(no subject)
flick your cigarette then kiss me
kai/sehun/lu han & kai/taemin, r, 2500ⓦ
Note: Not the model AU anyone but Viva and I wanted; related reading. Warning for brief mention of eating disorders.
The mattress that Jongin pushes Sehun into still doesn’t have proper sheets, still left on the floor like an afterthought in their tiny one-person flat. “Welcome home,” Jongin says, maybe laughs it, as he crawls over him, and the sound is thrilling, Sehun reeling Jongin in to unwind the flutter in his chest, Jongin’s teeth sharp against Sehun’s throat like he wants to draw blood.
Jongin sits at the edge of the mattress and smokes afterward, without bothering to open the window. Sehun, still lying down, trails his gaze to the fire alarm on the opposite wall. It’s duct taped, which makes Sehun laugh, propping himself up with an arm and leaning into Jongin’s right elbow. Jongin holds the cigarette to Sehun’s lips with his left hand, lets him take a long drag before pulling it away for himself, tipping the ashes into an empty beer bottle, the movement lazy and graceful.
Things get moved around, but nothing ever seems to change; to some extent, they’re all transients, “home” just an interim between calls, the place you kind of hated seeing because it meant you didn’t have any bookings - but the closest thing they have to a home is still bare, stripped down, housing the perpetual paranoia of failing to make rent like a fourth tenant. The closest thing to a personality the place has is the thrifted copy of Fahrenheit 451 splayed open on the table and the unwashed bowl next to it, the wall so splintered they could practically see their next door neighbours through the drywall, damage unmentioned on the listing because even then it was practically four-star for the LES.
Jongin’s Alex Turner poster is coming off on its top right corner again, Scotch tape flecked with the paint it’d peeled off the wall, curling like a leaf next to a post-it on which Lu Han had scribbled, Oh Sehun, you owe me $5! and which Sehun had taken the liberty of crossing out once he’d paid him back, without it occurring to him to take it down - as if forgetfulness were a stand-in for decor.
And then there are traces of Taemin, stale and lingering: a CD booklet for some rock band or other, whose name Lu Han had laughed at, saying, what if I started a band called Ten Inch Nails, broken earphones hiding under a stack of junk mail. A month after he’d had moved out and it was his absence that festered and rankled: the only knife left was plastic, from some junk food chain, and Jongin sometimes still looked like he was trying not to say come back to the person walking out the door.
“I’m hungry,” Sehun says, stretching his arms over his head when Jongin’s down to the end of his cigarette. He leans over the side of the mattress to find his shirt, half buried under his letterman.
“Breakfast of champions,” Jongin says, flicking his lighter, but acquiesces when Sehun rolls his eyes, finishing off his cigarette and cramming it through the bottleneck. It’s close enough to noon for a first meal; Jongin stands to tug his clothes back on, black jeans and a thin white T-shirt, foals scrawled across the front.
It’s a block and a half’s walk to the nearest bodega, manholes disgorging steam in large, menacing billows and fleets of cars running yellow lights, zigzagging over the crosswalk. There’s an issue of Nylon amongst the array of publications displayed outside, Choi Jinri on the back cover advertisement in a Marchesa dress, long black hair spilling over her shoulders, skin pale and lips blooming red, cat-eyes drawn in thick and heavy. “Shit,” Jongin says, voice full of wonder, picking it up to look at it. “She looks like the fucking devil.”
People said she got into the industry too early, editorials lined up at her feet before she’d even hit puberty. It’d caused a storm of controversy, at the time, inadvertently skyrocketed her straight to her first show. They said the same thing about Jongin, too, but while they were probably right about Jinri, with Jongin it was just that he’d been in it for too long; he wore the arrogance, the sex, “mannequin” like a second skin, so that Sehun always had to dig for anything real, anything that wasn’t meant to be sold but just there, just Jongin.
Because once, Jongin, drunk at a PFW afterparty and lost in what might have been the 9th Arrondissement, had pulled Sehun to sit on the stairs leading to the subway, a sprawling fire hazard, and whispered in his ear, the only time I feel like my body is mine is when I have sex. This, Sehun remembers thinking, is why they say he got into the industry too early, but it was partly also just Jongin refusing to admit he’d had his heart broken.
It was a bad idea to sleep with Jongin, but it was infinitely worse to say no to him, somehow, when he said please, even if he didn’t remember it the next morning; he sunk into Jongin while under them, the sea drank the city in a siren song, a romance and a tragedy.
And he could see it, too, the way Jongin during sex was real, even vulnerable, giving his body up to something only he could own, every little death. The infinitesimal moment where Jongin, stripped of glamour and self-destructiveness, would reach out, brutally laid open, without façade.
Sehun slings an arm around Jongin’s shoulder, relaxed and easy. It is as close as they get to intimacy, any kind of depth of feeling: Jongin leans into the touch for a moment. Then he puts the magazine back so that the metal rack runs across her neck.
*
Jongin was scouted on the streets when he was fifteen, for the ligne that he would eventually sell to a cadenced walk, a graceful turn. He’d mistaken the business card for a flyer or a scam at first, shoulders hunched as he tried unsuccessfully to dodge past the agency recruiter, mumbling, “Not interested.”
Different company, same tactics: Sehun, at seventeen, had run from what he’d thought was a particularly aggressive come-on, and was unflaggingly chased for four blocks before, out of breath and his breakfast, which he’d dropped turning a corner and was probably already lost to the carrion birds of Midtown, he took the card and shoved it into his pocket without looking. The city had perfected his look of testy disinterest, and he nodded, not really listening as she said something about Chinese, interested in ethnic models, and forgot about it until the card shook out of his jeans along with $0.43 in change on laundry day.
Lu Han was picked up an amateur, opted for a life of international flights and sleeplessness, trading the terror of being shot sky-high and the wax and wane of the shadows under his eyes for the chance to be paid in currency instead of clothes; was picked up in turn by Sehun, who had let Lu Han grip his hand so hard on a rocky descent into PEK that he left marks that stung when touched, who had let Lu Han apologise later with the same hands, whose name was the only one on the lease.
Just something to do, Sehun had told himself. Until he got things figured out. But the industry didn’t work that way: it took something from you, left you with your fingers down your throat or picking your poisons, always perpetuating the glamour that got you trapped in the first place. By the time he was nineteen he’d been to every major international airport, gotten lost in the endless cobblestone streets of Milan and dragged himself through onslaughts of London weather in a dreadnought, coughed up smog and alcohol in Los Angeles and felt Beijing, Tokyo, Seoul buzzing and swarming around him; and even before then, he’d learnt that it was the cracks that they could fill with gold. “Male model” was an occupation you let use you and break you and leave you for dead by the time your age could be rounded to thirty: he’d learnt that it was the people who didn’t hate it that you felt sorry for.
He wasn’t Lu Han, who sang as he salvaged his toast from the jaws of the crumb-choked toaster, pretty little ballads in Mandarin, each and every one of them about heartbreak; or Jongin, who he’d never seen dance but knew he must, still, from the way he carried the grace, like a shadow or a secret. He’d had nothing to take away when he signed on, but when it was over, there was nothing that would take him back. But to only end up in proverbial wasteland, stuck cultivating distant dreams - artist, musician, actor, writer, each of them as unlikely as the next - trying to be more than a face and clinging to it like a lifeline anyway, rapidly approaching expiry all the while: it was something to be grateful for.
⎯
Lu Han is one of the last minute additions to Jongin’s final booking in Seoul, filling in for one of the models who’d been caught with marijuana - the industry’s fluctuating morals at play, again. Jongin sees him after his own walk, stripped down to his briefs and stepping into a different pair of trousers, dropping what is probably several thousand dollars onto the floor like trash. It takes him less than a minute, outstripping military in its clockwork, before he’s dressed again, hair and makeup intact, filing into his place in line. The only thing that surprises him is that a replacement would walk twice.
Seoul Fashion Week is always wildly experimental; Jongin spends ten minutes scrubbing the circus paint off his face with a grimace while the backstage area is swarmed with what looks like Halloween come early. He hangs around afterwards, waiting for Lu Han, and when he appears, Jongin lets him pilfer a couple drags off his cigarette, fresh out of one of the cartons he’d bought coming through duty-free.
Someone detaches from the commotion of the next imminent show, approaching Lu Han with a camera, and it takes a while for Jongin to separate his voice from the rest of the multilingual chatter, realise he’s speaking in Mandarin. Lu Han makes a brief reply before tugging on Jongin’s elbow, muttering by way of explanation, “Blogger.”
Jongin’s shifting into a pose before Blogger has his camera ready, dropping the cigarette and snuffing it out with his boot. Neither of them are wearing anything even remotely Sartorialist-worthy - Blogger, with a gauzy scarf and multiple piercings, looks more the part they do. When they’re left alone again, Lu Han just looks down at the flattened cigarette and says, “Waste of a smoke.”
*
Jongin’s milling on the sidewalk, closing his eyes to feel the thump of the bass in the club as he leans against the side of the building. The wind is cool, teasing the loose collar of his shirt; his mouth is still sweet with the tequila and salt he’d licked off Lu Han’s wrist, tongue chasing it down the valley of his palm, revelling in the press of Lu Han’s fingers on the inside of his cheek before Lu Han had laughed, pushed him away gently, and said, you’re drunk.
Isn’t everyone? Jongin said, but went outside anyway, sending Sehun a pointless text he knew Sehun would ignore, too busy watching some film and probably getting high, some kind of girl’s night affair with some models he’d met off his last shoot for some Made in U.S.A. brand with a casting call that had basically said, eating disorders preferred, wire coat hanger girls.
He pulls from the cigarette between his fingers, exhaling slowly and opening his eyes. He’s startled to see Taemin, but thankfully drunk enough that he doesn’t do anything but look fixedly at him as he approaches. His hair is shorter, but he looks the same, otherwise, blinking before he smiles, says, “Hey, haven't seen you in a while.”
The last shoot they’d done together was early in the fall/winter campaign, with two European models and a vintage car in a neighbourhood in Logan Square, foliage ablaze with light. By then, Taemin had already been dating Jinri for a month, and Jongin didn’t look at him once, didn’t have to, as he wound an arm around one of the models’ waists, stepped in close, and pressed his body to hers for the camera that swooped in like a voyeur.
Something warm and solid bumps against his shoulder, then, a voice in his ear saying, “Thank me later,” right before Lu Han slides a hand into his back pocket, looks at Taemin coolly, and calls a cab.
-it smells sharply of vodka, a hiss caught between Jongin’s teeth as the needle leaves his skin, Taemin leaning back to admire his handiwork. The letters are stark, slanted against his hipbone, the skin around it red and painful. “You’re so good,” Taemin breathes, leaning up to kiss him, and when his fingers dig into the skin just under the fresh ink, Jongin whines, shuddering. Taemin says his name back to him as if trying to make him remember, Jongin, Jongin, Jongin, and Jongin is drowning, insensate to everything but Taemin, hot under his skin-
It’s Lu Han who’s running a thumb over the letters now, as if only just seeing them for the first time, while Jongin frowns, twists impatiently. Lu Han’s hands frame the concave of his hipbones as he says wryly, “Caveat emptor, huh?”
The ink is starting to fade, as ephemeral as the pain, as everything else. As if they weren’t all damaged goods, one way or another; his body is a canvas - here is the place your fingernails bit, here is the place where you left the angry kiss of a bruise, here is where you whispered lies into my skin. Every inch of him is mapped, meticulous as a science. Jongin leans up, runs a hand through Lu Han’s hair. “Shut up,” he says, and crashes their mouths together.
*
When Jongin is alone, he flicks the lights off, the floor creaking as he walks across it barefoot. He’s memorised the exact dimensions, all the little irregularities, with his steps, the slight uneven sag in the right corner and the dip in the centre from a flooding. He used to watch himself in the cracked reflection of Taemin’s tiny television set, but now there is only a pockmarked wall, another space, another thing he is learning to reclaim. He closes his eyes, lifts his arms and his head, feels his spine straighten, toes pointed. In his head, he hears the music crescendo in a swell of strings, the gilded grandeur of the Palais Garnier, and he dances.
kai/sehun/lu han & kai/taemin, r, 2500ⓦ
Note: Not the model AU anyone but Viva and I wanted; related reading. Warning for brief mention of eating disorders.
The mattress that Jongin pushes Sehun into still doesn’t have proper sheets, still left on the floor like an afterthought in their tiny one-person flat. “Welcome home,” Jongin says, maybe laughs it, as he crawls over him, and the sound is thrilling, Sehun reeling Jongin in to unwind the flutter in his chest, Jongin’s teeth sharp against Sehun’s throat like he wants to draw blood.
Jongin sits at the edge of the mattress and smokes afterward, without bothering to open the window. Sehun, still lying down, trails his gaze to the fire alarm on the opposite wall. It’s duct taped, which makes Sehun laugh, propping himself up with an arm and leaning into Jongin’s right elbow. Jongin holds the cigarette to Sehun’s lips with his left hand, lets him take a long drag before pulling it away for himself, tipping the ashes into an empty beer bottle, the movement lazy and graceful.
Things get moved around, but nothing ever seems to change; to some extent, they’re all transients, “home” just an interim between calls, the place you kind of hated seeing because it meant you didn’t have any bookings - but the closest thing they have to a home is still bare, stripped down, housing the perpetual paranoia of failing to make rent like a fourth tenant. The closest thing to a personality the place has is the thrifted copy of Fahrenheit 451 splayed open on the table and the unwashed bowl next to it, the wall so splintered they could practically see their next door neighbours through the drywall, damage unmentioned on the listing because even then it was practically four-star for the LES.
Jongin’s Alex Turner poster is coming off on its top right corner again, Scotch tape flecked with the paint it’d peeled off the wall, curling like a leaf next to a post-it on which Lu Han had scribbled, Oh Sehun, you owe me $5! and which Sehun had taken the liberty of crossing out once he’d paid him back, without it occurring to him to take it down - as if forgetfulness were a stand-in for decor.
And then there are traces of Taemin, stale and lingering: a CD booklet for some rock band or other, whose name Lu Han had laughed at, saying, what if I started a band called Ten Inch Nails, broken earphones hiding under a stack of junk mail. A month after he’d had moved out and it was his absence that festered and rankled: the only knife left was plastic, from some junk food chain, and Jongin sometimes still looked like he was trying not to say come back to the person walking out the door.
“I’m hungry,” Sehun says, stretching his arms over his head when Jongin’s down to the end of his cigarette. He leans over the side of the mattress to find his shirt, half buried under his letterman.
“Breakfast of champions,” Jongin says, flicking his lighter, but acquiesces when Sehun rolls his eyes, finishing off his cigarette and cramming it through the bottleneck. It’s close enough to noon for a first meal; Jongin stands to tug his clothes back on, black jeans and a thin white T-shirt, foals scrawled across the front.
It’s a block and a half’s walk to the nearest bodega, manholes disgorging steam in large, menacing billows and fleets of cars running yellow lights, zigzagging over the crosswalk. There’s an issue of Nylon amongst the array of publications displayed outside, Choi Jinri on the back cover advertisement in a Marchesa dress, long black hair spilling over her shoulders, skin pale and lips blooming red, cat-eyes drawn in thick and heavy. “Shit,” Jongin says, voice full of wonder, picking it up to look at it. “She looks like the fucking devil.”
People said she got into the industry too early, editorials lined up at her feet before she’d even hit puberty. It’d caused a storm of controversy, at the time, inadvertently skyrocketed her straight to her first show. They said the same thing about Jongin, too, but while they were probably right about Jinri, with Jongin it was just that he’d been in it for too long; he wore the arrogance, the sex, “mannequin” like a second skin, so that Sehun always had to dig for anything real, anything that wasn’t meant to be sold but just there, just Jongin.
Because once, Jongin, drunk at a PFW afterparty and lost in what might have been the 9th Arrondissement, had pulled Sehun to sit on the stairs leading to the subway, a sprawling fire hazard, and whispered in his ear, the only time I feel like my body is mine is when I have sex. This, Sehun remembers thinking, is why they say he got into the industry too early, but it was partly also just Jongin refusing to admit he’d had his heart broken.
It was a bad idea to sleep with Jongin, but it was infinitely worse to say no to him, somehow, when he said please, even if he didn’t remember it the next morning; he sunk into Jongin while under them, the sea drank the city in a siren song, a romance and a tragedy.
And he could see it, too, the way Jongin during sex was real, even vulnerable, giving his body up to something only he could own, every little death. The infinitesimal moment where Jongin, stripped of glamour and self-destructiveness, would reach out, brutally laid open, without façade.
Sehun slings an arm around Jongin’s shoulder, relaxed and easy. It is as close as they get to intimacy, any kind of depth of feeling: Jongin leans into the touch for a moment. Then he puts the magazine back so that the metal rack runs across her neck.
*
Jongin was scouted on the streets when he was fifteen, for the ligne that he would eventually sell to a cadenced walk, a graceful turn. He’d mistaken the business card for a flyer or a scam at first, shoulders hunched as he tried unsuccessfully to dodge past the agency recruiter, mumbling, “Not interested.”
Different company, same tactics: Sehun, at seventeen, had run from what he’d thought was a particularly aggressive come-on, and was unflaggingly chased for four blocks before, out of breath and his breakfast, which he’d dropped turning a corner and was probably already lost to the carrion birds of Midtown, he took the card and shoved it into his pocket without looking. The city had perfected his look of testy disinterest, and he nodded, not really listening as she said something about Chinese, interested in ethnic models, and forgot about it until the card shook out of his jeans along with $0.43 in change on laundry day.
Lu Han was picked up an amateur, opted for a life of international flights and sleeplessness, trading the terror of being shot sky-high and the wax and wane of the shadows under his eyes for the chance to be paid in currency instead of clothes; was picked up in turn by Sehun, who had let Lu Han grip his hand so hard on a rocky descent into PEK that he left marks that stung when touched, who had let Lu Han apologise later with the same hands, whose name was the only one on the lease.
Just something to do, Sehun had told himself. Until he got things figured out. But the industry didn’t work that way: it took something from you, left you with your fingers down your throat or picking your poisons, always perpetuating the glamour that got you trapped in the first place. By the time he was nineteen he’d been to every major international airport, gotten lost in the endless cobblestone streets of Milan and dragged himself through onslaughts of London weather in a dreadnought, coughed up smog and alcohol in Los Angeles and felt Beijing, Tokyo, Seoul buzzing and swarming around him; and even before then, he’d learnt that it was the cracks that they could fill with gold. “Male model” was an occupation you let use you and break you and leave you for dead by the time your age could be rounded to thirty: he’d learnt that it was the people who didn’t hate it that you felt sorry for.
He wasn’t Lu Han, who sang as he salvaged his toast from the jaws of the crumb-choked toaster, pretty little ballads in Mandarin, each and every one of them about heartbreak; or Jongin, who he’d never seen dance but knew he must, still, from the way he carried the grace, like a shadow or a secret. He’d had nothing to take away when he signed on, but when it was over, there was nothing that would take him back. But to only end up in proverbial wasteland, stuck cultivating distant dreams - artist, musician, actor, writer, each of them as unlikely as the next - trying to be more than a face and clinging to it like a lifeline anyway, rapidly approaching expiry all the while: it was something to be grateful for.
⎯
Lu Han is one of the last minute additions to Jongin’s final booking in Seoul, filling in for one of the models who’d been caught with marijuana - the industry’s fluctuating morals at play, again. Jongin sees him after his own walk, stripped down to his briefs and stepping into a different pair of trousers, dropping what is probably several thousand dollars onto the floor like trash. It takes him less than a minute, outstripping military in its clockwork, before he’s dressed again, hair and makeup intact, filing into his place in line. The only thing that surprises him is that a replacement would walk twice.
Seoul Fashion Week is always wildly experimental; Jongin spends ten minutes scrubbing the circus paint off his face with a grimace while the backstage area is swarmed with what looks like Halloween come early. He hangs around afterwards, waiting for Lu Han, and when he appears, Jongin lets him pilfer a couple drags off his cigarette, fresh out of one of the cartons he’d bought coming through duty-free.
Someone detaches from the commotion of the next imminent show, approaching Lu Han with a camera, and it takes a while for Jongin to separate his voice from the rest of the multilingual chatter, realise he’s speaking in Mandarin. Lu Han makes a brief reply before tugging on Jongin’s elbow, muttering by way of explanation, “Blogger.”
Jongin’s shifting into a pose before Blogger has his camera ready, dropping the cigarette and snuffing it out with his boot. Neither of them are wearing anything even remotely Sartorialist-worthy - Blogger, with a gauzy scarf and multiple piercings, looks more the part they do. When they’re left alone again, Lu Han just looks down at the flattened cigarette and says, “Waste of a smoke.”
*
Jongin’s milling on the sidewalk, closing his eyes to feel the thump of the bass in the club as he leans against the side of the building. The wind is cool, teasing the loose collar of his shirt; his mouth is still sweet with the tequila and salt he’d licked off Lu Han’s wrist, tongue chasing it down the valley of his palm, revelling in the press of Lu Han’s fingers on the inside of his cheek before Lu Han had laughed, pushed him away gently, and said, you’re drunk.
Isn’t everyone? Jongin said, but went outside anyway, sending Sehun a pointless text he knew Sehun would ignore, too busy watching some film and probably getting high, some kind of girl’s night affair with some models he’d met off his last shoot for some Made in U.S.A. brand with a casting call that had basically said, eating disorders preferred, wire coat hanger girls.
He pulls from the cigarette between his fingers, exhaling slowly and opening his eyes. He’s startled to see Taemin, but thankfully drunk enough that he doesn’t do anything but look fixedly at him as he approaches. His hair is shorter, but he looks the same, otherwise, blinking before he smiles, says, “Hey, haven't seen you in a while.”
The last shoot they’d done together was early in the fall/winter campaign, with two European models and a vintage car in a neighbourhood in Logan Square, foliage ablaze with light. By then, Taemin had already been dating Jinri for a month, and Jongin didn’t look at him once, didn’t have to, as he wound an arm around one of the models’ waists, stepped in close, and pressed his body to hers for the camera that swooped in like a voyeur.
Something warm and solid bumps against his shoulder, then, a voice in his ear saying, “Thank me later,” right before Lu Han slides a hand into his back pocket, looks at Taemin coolly, and calls a cab.
-it smells sharply of vodka, a hiss caught between Jongin’s teeth as the needle leaves his skin, Taemin leaning back to admire his handiwork. The letters are stark, slanted against his hipbone, the skin around it red and painful. “You’re so good,” Taemin breathes, leaning up to kiss him, and when his fingers dig into the skin just under the fresh ink, Jongin whines, shuddering. Taemin says his name back to him as if trying to make him remember, Jongin, Jongin, Jongin, and Jongin is drowning, insensate to everything but Taemin, hot under his skin-
It’s Lu Han who’s running a thumb over the letters now, as if only just seeing them for the first time, while Jongin frowns, twists impatiently. Lu Han’s hands frame the concave of his hipbones as he says wryly, “Caveat emptor, huh?”
The ink is starting to fade, as ephemeral as the pain, as everything else. As if they weren’t all damaged goods, one way or another; his body is a canvas - here is the place your fingernails bit, here is the place where you left the angry kiss of a bruise, here is where you whispered lies into my skin. Every inch of him is mapped, meticulous as a science. Jongin leans up, runs a hand through Lu Han’s hair. “Shut up,” he says, and crashes their mouths together.
*
When Jongin is alone, he flicks the lights off, the floor creaking as he walks across it barefoot. He’s memorised the exact dimensions, all the little irregularities, with his steps, the slight uneven sag in the right corner and the dip in the centre from a flooding. He used to watch himself in the cracked reflection of Taemin’s tiny television set, but now there is only a pockmarked wall, another space, another thing he is learning to reclaim. He closes his eyes, lifts his arms and his head, feels his spine straighten, toes pointed. In his head, he hears the music crescendo in a swell of strings, the gilded grandeur of the Palais Garnier, and he dances.