[infinite] the death of (nam) woohyun
Title: the death of (nam) woohyun
Rating: r
Word count: 2100
Summary: Nam Woohyun turns into Woohyun almost unintentionally.
the death of (nam) woohyun
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to.
“borges and i,” jorges luis borges
∞
One morning, Nam Woohyun wakes up, looks in the mirror, and decides that his stage makeup from Inkigayo’s performance hasn't quite come off correctly. Which is ridiculous, really, since he always washes his face carefully before going to sleep, but he has at least half an hour before any of the others start queuing for the bathroom, so he locks himself inside and starts running the tap, watching colored water curl around the basin and slip down the drain. There’s something intensely mesmerizing about the process, and a pressure on his ribcage that he can’t quite alleviate.
Sunggyu smashes into the room three quarters of a hour later, cheeks red, chest heaving, doorknob loose in his palm.
"I’ve been calling you for fifteen mi--”
Sunggyu pauses, lunges forward, grabs at Woohyun’s fingers, and stares at his nails, which is very inconvenient seeing as they’re still dirty--he’s still dirty, and if Sunggyu’s awake they probably don’t have much time before their next schedule. Whatever it was supposed to be. Is it really Monday? Lazy ass probably hasn’t even bothered waking up any of the other boys.
“What the fuck are you doing?"
"Excuse me," Nam Woohyun manages between pants. He’s out of breath and his throat is hoarse and he might have been screaming. There are gaps in time that he can’t quite manage to account for. "I’m sort of busy. Cleaning. You can fuck off right about now.”
"Oh my god, is this blood. Why--what the fuck it’s all over you.”
Nam Woohyun looks down. There really is blood everywhere, but his face is still frozen in that unforgivably stupid Woohyun-smile that's plastered all over Infinite's album covers and he can't seem to get it off. The mirror glints oddly.
It must not be the makeup.
“No,” Nam Woohyun says with a sort of finality. Woohyun bubbles under his skin, and he thinks that’s why Sunggyu’s shaking his hand and touching his arm and bothering. “I think it’s inside of me.”
∞
When Woohyun models, he’s complimented by staff members for being exceedingly friendly, professional, and glamorous. Woohyun knows how to charm the camera, what angles look best when captured in two dimensions, how far his shirt will ride up over his hips if he cants his body forward jerkily enough to look like an accident. And when they’ve wrapped up the day’s filiming, he knows to smile and bow and thank everyone for their work, applauding himself as much as the rest of them. He greets the fans camping outside of Infinite's dorm with air-blown kisses and laughs and every viewpoint finds his face between shuttering lenses. Within hours, both official and unofficial photographs flood fan cafes, twitter, and me2day.
“I don’t know why you care so much,” Myungsoo says sometimes when he says anything at all, turning the pages of his Japanese phrasebook. “It’s just a few pictures.”
A few Internet rankings is all that separates them from oblivion, Woohyun wants to say. Myungsoo just closes his eyes and flicks his hair out of his face with a finger and Woohyun thinks that L might be attractive, but he certainly isn’t idol-potential.
“No reason.”
Though he doesn’t often admit it, Nam Woohyun’s first modelling call was a fluke. He was picked up off the streets of Seoul while visiting an old friend and offered a job, introduced to a pretty thing named Park Jiyeon and stood next to a Yong Junhyung and smiled for the people behind the camera. Spotlights burned circles into his eyes and he’d tried to grin but felt his cheeks turn to rubber while the world blurred. He found himself grabbing at nothing, choking on the heavy weight of disappointment and failure.
“Don’t worry so much,” Junhyung had said. “Don’t laugh. Don’t try to look happy. Just look unconcerned. That’s what they’re really looking for, you know? A different side of you.”
Jiyeon leaned backwards, neck up, and smirked into the screen. Nam Woohyun felt his stomach roll.
It had taken him a very long time to understand what Junhyung had meant, but by then, Junhyung had passed out of Xing into Cube and debuted into the mainstream music scene. Nam Woohyun’s face had been blown up to fill four huge canvas sheets glued to several entrances to shopping malls around Seoul, but there was a softness about the picture that was instantly forgettable. And he was forgotten.
“I want to try singing,” he’d told his mother months later, watching pretty little Jiyeon in patent leather heels and an absurdly short dress dancing on television. She’d gone viral with her sharp eyes and knowing glare. “I want to go to Seoul.”
Woohyun knows what to say when he’s asked certain questions. The fans are my girlfriends, he laughs when the point is raised in every interview. I love them. All of them. He’ll shrug off Hoya’s choke of disbelief and insincerity, and smile, folding his arms into hearts and blowing kisses. It’s just a game, and these are the rules and somehow he’s started to almost believe in them.
He wishes the others would try half as hard.
“Maybe it’s not your acting,” he says offhandedly, watching Sungyeol tear apart another script. The cameras are off, Lee Sungyeol’s unwashed hair is slicked off his forehead, and he’s lounging around in glassless frames and a sour pout; even with all of the history and promise of SM behind him, Sungyeol knows how to turn himself off. “Maybe it’s your personality. You don’t acquiesce enough.”
The boy just blinks. “I think I am going to beat your fucking skull in, hyung.”
“Don’t fight,” Sunggyu calls tiredly from their room. “Just sleep. It's another long day of schedules tomorrow."
“We’re best friends, all of us,” he tells the interviewer. He throws an arm around Sungjong’s shoulder and leans in for a hug, voice dropping. He can almost hear the cameraman zooming in. “But I’ll admit--sometimes I play favorites.”
She laughs indulgently and he preens, fingers creeping up Sungjong's thigh.
“I don’t lie,” Sungjong says later in the car. “None of us do. We tell them that we don’t like you if they ask. You’re the only one who never answers that question.” And then, “if you touch me like that again in public, I’ll bite you.”
“It’s just a game,” he says. He feels Sunggyu’s far-too-even breath on the nape of his neck, basking in the silent approval.
And Woohyun loves playing.
It took only a few weeks for Nam Woohyun to realize that he was one of the best singers Woolim Entertainment had, and that he’d most certainly be debuting in the coming months or years. In lessons he learned how to breathe, how to maintain control while moving upward through an arpeggio, but he spent most of his time brushing off halfhearted criticism, instead choosing to watch his fellow trainees crack and shift into flats or sharps. Save Kim Sunggyu, of course--Kim Jongwan’s favorite never made mistakes.
“I like your voice,” he said one day after everyone had left, kicking against the piano leg in the practice room. “And I thought that we could be friends. Or something.”
Nam Woohyun came to Seoul with a suitcase of clothing and a bank card in his wallet and an emptiness in his gut. He watched Sunggyu roll his eyes and walk out of the room and wondered when the laws of physics changed on him, when empty space started to spontaneously gather mass and fall.
“Try and cultivate a personality. You’re very forgettable," Sunggyu said later, after the members slated to debut in Infinite had been announced along with their impending move to a new dorm. “We’re supposed to be idols. Interesting. Attractive.”
It was true--Nam Woohyun was forgettable. Even Sungjong had to ask who he was when they’d met over lunch. Nam Woohyun had recognized him instantaneously: the kid who never showed up alert enough for morning dance practice.
“I’m perfect,” Nam Woohyun said, meaning only half of it.
“And really boring.”
Nam Woohyun had kicked at the piano leg in the practice room they shared. The sound had echoed oddly in the silence of the room. “So what am I supposed to do?”
“Adjust.”
During their first photoshoot as a group, Nam Woohyun leaned against a wall and remembered what Yong Junhyung had said two years previously. He pulled up the boy’s contact information on his phone, and his finger hesitated over the number. Call me if you want anything, the boy had said. You don’t get to hold onto many friends when you float around the industry as much as I do. And if you do, usually it’s all about lying to the camera anyway.
Jiyeon hadn’t given him her number. Just a half-hearted shrug as her eyes had slid past him.
“Woohyun? Are you ready? We’re starting!”
Nam Woohyun smiled. After a moment, he closed his eyes, compartmentalized, and pulled back into himself.
“Yes,” Woohyun said.
Woohyun was hard to deal with. He slid off between shoots, and Nam Woohyun had to escape to empty bathroom stalls to reconstruct the artifice, withdrawing even further every time, remembering the magnetism of Jiyeon’s clinical glare. He tried to remember lines from movies and variety shows that he could use to pin Woohyun down, to make him more real, more likeable, more vibrant. And slowly it got easier.
At the end of the day, he was even harder to remove--Nam Woohyun found himself mocking Sungjong’s horrible taste in music and ruffling Sungyeol’s hair right after he’d washed it. Woohyun laughed for invisible cameras, and applauded his own puns, and even Myungsoo would roll his eyes every once in a while and pointedly toy with the volume control on his mp3 payer.
“I know you never actually listen to music,” Woohyun said one day. “You don’t even like singing.”
Sungyeol closed his script-of-the-evening. “Shut it, Woohyun.”
“No seriously. At least do something productive. You can’t coast on your looks forever.”
Woohyun was kind of cruel. In a funny way, of course. Everyone appreciated honesty.
“I could say the same thing about you,” Sunggyu said.
“I’m consistent.”
“And boring.”
Woohyun tried harder. There were only so many notes which he could trail off with a hint of vibrato.
The tension coiled in Nam Woohyun's stomach. When he disappeared, it was that much easier to sing.
Woohyun went to sleep, and sometimes Woohyun woke up and Nam Woohyun just watched.
Sunggyu kissed him after they staggered into the dorm, exhausted from filming “Come Back Again.” Woohyun’s head collided with the inside panel of the door to their room, and felt Sunggyu’s fingers dig into the flesh of his upper arms.
“You were good today.”
I hit all my notes, Nam Woohyun thought. Or guessed. It was hard to be sure--lately the world had started taking a little longer to trickle past Woohyun into cognition.
“My eyeliner will melt,” Woohyun said, gasping.
Sunggyu bit into Woohyun’s shoulder, tracing his collarbone with his tongue and licking into the hollow where neck met sternum. “You were on point.”
The room was dark. Woohyun fiddled with Sunggyu’s jeans, tugging down the zipper, sliding the heavy fabric over his hips. “Of course. I was perfect. Sungyeol was slow, though.”
“Three retakes. That’s all.”
He curled into Sunggyu’s arms, one hand running down the knobs of Sunggyu’s spine, the other palming his cock through his briefs.
“You would have told me off for something like that.”
And Sunggyu pushed Woohyun to his knees. “Stop talking. Stop thinking.”
“Ever consider acting?” 10Asia’s interviewer has beautiful long hair, and stray wisps curl underneath her right breast.
Woohyun leans forward and grins. “I’d be horrible at it.”
Sungjong bites him in the car. Woohyun laughs.
∞
“You don’t need to be so rude to the kids, Woohyun-ah,” Sunggyu says softly, finger thumbing at Woohyun’s hip. Woohyun jerks against the mattress, toes curling in the blanket.
“I thought that you wanted this.”
“No, Infinite needed it. I’ve never wanted either of you.”
Sunggyu leans down to kiss Woohyun.
Neither of them are sure which one.
∞
a/n: my beta puts up with so much.
dear reifica, please solve for i: 9x - 7i > 3(3x - 7u). ♥.
Rating: r
Word count: 2100
Summary: Nam Woohyun turns into Woohyun almost unintentionally.
the death of (nam) woohyun
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to.
“borges and i,” jorges luis borges
∞
One morning, Nam Woohyun wakes up, looks in the mirror, and decides that his stage makeup from Inkigayo’s performance hasn't quite come off correctly. Which is ridiculous, really, since he always washes his face carefully before going to sleep, but he has at least half an hour before any of the others start queuing for the bathroom, so he locks himself inside and starts running the tap, watching colored water curl around the basin and slip down the drain. There’s something intensely mesmerizing about the process, and a pressure on his ribcage that he can’t quite alleviate.
Sunggyu smashes into the room three quarters of a hour later, cheeks red, chest heaving, doorknob loose in his palm.
"I’ve been calling you for fifteen mi--”
Sunggyu pauses, lunges forward, grabs at Woohyun’s fingers, and stares at his nails, which is very inconvenient seeing as they’re still dirty--he’s still dirty, and if Sunggyu’s awake they probably don’t have much time before their next schedule. Whatever it was supposed to be. Is it really Monday? Lazy ass probably hasn’t even bothered waking up any of the other boys.
“What the fuck are you doing?"
"Excuse me," Nam Woohyun manages between pants. He’s out of breath and his throat is hoarse and he might have been screaming. There are gaps in time that he can’t quite manage to account for. "I’m sort of busy. Cleaning. You can fuck off right about now.”
"Oh my god, is this blood. Why--what the fuck it’s all over you.”
Nam Woohyun looks down. There really is blood everywhere, but his face is still frozen in that unforgivably stupid Woohyun-smile that's plastered all over Infinite's album covers and he can't seem to get it off. The mirror glints oddly.
It must not be the makeup.
“No,” Nam Woohyun says with a sort of finality. Woohyun bubbles under his skin, and he thinks that’s why Sunggyu’s shaking his hand and touching his arm and bothering. “I think it’s inside of me.”
∞
When Woohyun models, he’s complimented by staff members for being exceedingly friendly, professional, and glamorous. Woohyun knows how to charm the camera, what angles look best when captured in two dimensions, how far his shirt will ride up over his hips if he cants his body forward jerkily enough to look like an accident. And when they’ve wrapped up the day’s filiming, he knows to smile and bow and thank everyone for their work, applauding himself as much as the rest of them. He greets the fans camping outside of Infinite's dorm with air-blown kisses and laughs and every viewpoint finds his face between shuttering lenses. Within hours, both official and unofficial photographs flood fan cafes, twitter, and me2day.
“I don’t know why you care so much,” Myungsoo says sometimes when he says anything at all, turning the pages of his Japanese phrasebook. “It’s just a few pictures.”
A few Internet rankings is all that separates them from oblivion, Woohyun wants to say. Myungsoo just closes his eyes and flicks his hair out of his face with a finger and Woohyun thinks that L might be attractive, but he certainly isn’t idol-potential.
“No reason.”
Though he doesn’t often admit it, Nam Woohyun’s first modelling call was a fluke. He was picked up off the streets of Seoul while visiting an old friend and offered a job, introduced to a pretty thing named Park Jiyeon and stood next to a Yong Junhyung and smiled for the people behind the camera. Spotlights burned circles into his eyes and he’d tried to grin but felt his cheeks turn to rubber while the world blurred. He found himself grabbing at nothing, choking on the heavy weight of disappointment and failure.
“Don’t worry so much,” Junhyung had said. “Don’t laugh. Don’t try to look happy. Just look unconcerned. That’s what they’re really looking for, you know? A different side of you.”
Jiyeon leaned backwards, neck up, and smirked into the screen. Nam Woohyun felt his stomach roll.
It had taken him a very long time to understand what Junhyung had meant, but by then, Junhyung had passed out of Xing into Cube and debuted into the mainstream music scene. Nam Woohyun’s face had been blown up to fill four huge canvas sheets glued to several entrances to shopping malls around Seoul, but there was a softness about the picture that was instantly forgettable. And he was forgotten.
“I want to try singing,” he’d told his mother months later, watching pretty little Jiyeon in patent leather heels and an absurdly short dress dancing on television. She’d gone viral with her sharp eyes and knowing glare. “I want to go to Seoul.”
Woohyun knows what to say when he’s asked certain questions. The fans are my girlfriends, he laughs when the point is raised in every interview. I love them. All of them. He’ll shrug off Hoya’s choke of disbelief and insincerity, and smile, folding his arms into hearts and blowing kisses. It’s just a game, and these are the rules and somehow he’s started to almost believe in them.
He wishes the others would try half as hard.
“Maybe it’s not your acting,” he says offhandedly, watching Sungyeol tear apart another script. The cameras are off, Lee Sungyeol’s unwashed hair is slicked off his forehead, and he’s lounging around in glassless frames and a sour pout; even with all of the history and promise of SM behind him, Sungyeol knows how to turn himself off. “Maybe it’s your personality. You don’t acquiesce enough.”
The boy just blinks. “I think I am going to beat your fucking skull in, hyung.”
“Don’t fight,” Sunggyu calls tiredly from their room. “Just sleep. It's another long day of schedules tomorrow."
“We’re best friends, all of us,” he tells the interviewer. He throws an arm around Sungjong’s shoulder and leans in for a hug, voice dropping. He can almost hear the cameraman zooming in. “But I’ll admit--sometimes I play favorites.”
She laughs indulgently and he preens, fingers creeping up Sungjong's thigh.
“I don’t lie,” Sungjong says later in the car. “None of us do. We tell them that we don’t like you if they ask. You’re the only one who never answers that question.” And then, “if you touch me like that again in public, I’ll bite you.”
“It’s just a game,” he says. He feels Sunggyu’s far-too-even breath on the nape of his neck, basking in the silent approval.
And Woohyun loves playing.
It took only a few weeks for Nam Woohyun to realize that he was one of the best singers Woolim Entertainment had, and that he’d most certainly be debuting in the coming months or years. In lessons he learned how to breathe, how to maintain control while moving upward through an arpeggio, but he spent most of his time brushing off halfhearted criticism, instead choosing to watch his fellow trainees crack and shift into flats or sharps. Save Kim Sunggyu, of course--Kim Jongwan’s favorite never made mistakes.
“I like your voice,” he said one day after everyone had left, kicking against the piano leg in the practice room. “And I thought that we could be friends. Or something.”
Nam Woohyun came to Seoul with a suitcase of clothing and a bank card in his wallet and an emptiness in his gut. He watched Sunggyu roll his eyes and walk out of the room and wondered when the laws of physics changed on him, when empty space started to spontaneously gather mass and fall.
“Try and cultivate a personality. You’re very forgettable," Sunggyu said later, after the members slated to debut in Infinite had been announced along with their impending move to a new dorm. “We’re supposed to be idols. Interesting. Attractive.”
It was true--Nam Woohyun was forgettable. Even Sungjong had to ask who he was when they’d met over lunch. Nam Woohyun had recognized him instantaneously: the kid who never showed up alert enough for morning dance practice.
“I’m perfect,” Nam Woohyun said, meaning only half of it.
“And really boring.”
Nam Woohyun had kicked at the piano leg in the practice room they shared. The sound had echoed oddly in the silence of the room. “So what am I supposed to do?”
“Adjust.”
During their first photoshoot as a group, Nam Woohyun leaned against a wall and remembered what Yong Junhyung had said two years previously. He pulled up the boy’s contact information on his phone, and his finger hesitated over the number. Call me if you want anything, the boy had said. You don’t get to hold onto many friends when you float around the industry as much as I do. And if you do, usually it’s all about lying to the camera anyway.
Jiyeon hadn’t given him her number. Just a half-hearted shrug as her eyes had slid past him.
“Woohyun? Are you ready? We’re starting!”
Nam Woohyun smiled. After a moment, he closed his eyes, compartmentalized, and pulled back into himself.
“Yes,” Woohyun said.
Woohyun was hard to deal with. He slid off between shoots, and Nam Woohyun had to escape to empty bathroom stalls to reconstruct the artifice, withdrawing even further every time, remembering the magnetism of Jiyeon’s clinical glare. He tried to remember lines from movies and variety shows that he could use to pin Woohyun down, to make him more real, more likeable, more vibrant. And slowly it got easier.
At the end of the day, he was even harder to remove--Nam Woohyun found himself mocking Sungjong’s horrible taste in music and ruffling Sungyeol’s hair right after he’d washed it. Woohyun laughed for invisible cameras, and applauded his own puns, and even Myungsoo would roll his eyes every once in a while and pointedly toy with the volume control on his mp3 payer.
“I know you never actually listen to music,” Woohyun said one day. “You don’t even like singing.”
Sungyeol closed his script-of-the-evening. “Shut it, Woohyun.”
“No seriously. At least do something productive. You can’t coast on your looks forever.”
Woohyun was kind of cruel. In a funny way, of course. Everyone appreciated honesty.
“I could say the same thing about you,” Sunggyu said.
“I’m consistent.”
“And boring.”
Woohyun tried harder. There were only so many notes which he could trail off with a hint of vibrato.
The tension coiled in Nam Woohyun's stomach. When he disappeared, it was that much easier to sing.
Woohyun went to sleep, and sometimes Woohyun woke up and Nam Woohyun just watched.
Sunggyu kissed him after they staggered into the dorm, exhausted from filming “Come Back Again.” Woohyun’s head collided with the inside panel of the door to their room, and felt Sunggyu’s fingers dig into the flesh of his upper arms.
“You were good today.”
I hit all my notes, Nam Woohyun thought. Or guessed. It was hard to be sure--lately the world had started taking a little longer to trickle past Woohyun into cognition.
“My eyeliner will melt,” Woohyun said, gasping.
Sunggyu bit into Woohyun’s shoulder, tracing his collarbone with his tongue and licking into the hollow where neck met sternum. “You were on point.”
The room was dark. Woohyun fiddled with Sunggyu’s jeans, tugging down the zipper, sliding the heavy fabric over his hips. “Of course. I was perfect. Sungyeol was slow, though.”
“Three retakes. That’s all.”
He curled into Sunggyu’s arms, one hand running down the knobs of Sunggyu’s spine, the other palming his cock through his briefs.
“You would have told me off for something like that.”
And Sunggyu pushed Woohyun to his knees. “Stop talking. Stop thinking.”
“Ever consider acting?” 10Asia’s interviewer has beautiful long hair, and stray wisps curl underneath her right breast.
Woohyun leans forward and grins. “I’d be horrible at it.”
Sungjong bites him in the car. Woohyun laughs.
∞
“You don’t need to be so rude to the kids, Woohyun-ah,” Sunggyu says softly, finger thumbing at Woohyun’s hip. Woohyun jerks against the mattress, toes curling in the blanket.
“I thought that you wanted this.”
“No, Infinite needed it. I’ve never wanted either of you.”
Sunggyu leans down to kiss Woohyun.
Neither of them are sure which one.
∞
a/n: my beta puts up with so much.
dear reifica, please solve for i: 9x - 7i > 3(3x - 7u). ♥.