(no subject)
(dead wip) i fought the law (and the law won)
g-dragon/top, g-dragon/seungri, pg-13, 1540ⓦ
Note: Jesse James AU. Poem by Arkaye Kierulf.
IN THIS ROOM I WAS BORN.
AND I KNEW I WAS IN THE WRONG PLACE: THE WORLD.
I KNEW PAIN WAS TO COME.
I KNEW IT BY THE PERSISTENCE OF THE BLADE THAT CUT ME OUT.
I KNEW IT AS EVERY BABY BORN TO THE WORLD KNOWS IT: I CAME HERE TO DIE.
They would only ever remember him as the one who killed Kwon Jiyong, he realised. He would always recall it with the kind of cold, gripping miasma of an illness, the warmth of his gun and the fresh, point-blank splatter of Jiyong’s blood. The realisation made the satisfaction slip from it, the same way Jiyong’s inert form had crumpled to the floor effortlessly. Each time he relived it, which was often, he failed to notice that Jiyong’s eyes were already closed. Two months from now he would look down the barrel of Seunghyun’s gun and feel the same kind of acceptance, tinged with regret. And years from now, they would only remember Jiyong’s name. Forget, even, how he died. But before that-
The train shuddered along the path of the track, a freight of metal and steam, in the moonlight. The sound of the engine upset a murder of crows that alighted, noisily, amongst the trees.
Inside the train: the stifled sound of a baby crying; hushed, alarmed voices. A gunshot brooks silence, broken only by the harsh, frightened sobbing of a woman.
Jiyong sweeps in behind his gang, heading straight for the conductor’s carriage, affording only a glance by a young boy who gasps, “Kwon Jiyong,” before his father covers his mouth with a shaking hand, cradles the boy’s head to his chest. The links of his watch bite into his round, hairless cheek. He looks, despite himself, at the door Jiyong kicks open, slams shut.
Through the opaque window, stamped with the word “CONDUCTOR,” there are the shadowy figures of two men standing: Kwon Jiyong and Choi Seunghyun. These are familiar names, spoken in whispers and written in headlines, important names, wanted names. A clipping:
Kwon Jiyong, younger, is slight and pretty enough to be a girl. Jiyong is reckless, devil-may-care, and his voice is sharp and twanging. Choi Seunghyun, the elder of the two, is tall, imposing, and reticent. He has strong features, a sharp jaw and a deep, commanding voice. Neither of them are ever unarmed.
Between them kneels a third man, hands behind his head. The smoked glass makes the scene oneiric: silent, all three of them unmoving - and then the conductor is shot, and he hurries to drop his gaze. His hand has instinctively moved to cover his son’s eyes, his large hand clutching protectively, so that the boy whispers, father, I can’t breathe. With both hands, the child pulls his father’s fingers down, does what no one else on the train dares to, and watches the last train robbery of the Kwon gang.
He watched Jiyong watch the snake wind around his wrist, the dark emerald sinuous against the pale inside of his wrist, criss-crossed with blue veins.
When Seunghyun appeared, the crooked back door slamming back onto its frame, he could feel himself disappear. Jiyong didn’t react with either a smile or a word, and Seunghyun didn’t do anything except stand there, wood creaking when he leaned against the rail of the porch, lighter spitting and hissing to life. But Jiyong’s body responded to his presence with an alertness that no one else could wake up in him: with everyone else-with him, little Seunghyun, Jiyong was careless enough to be cruel. Liked to see him jealous, bitter, see his face contorted in pain and humiliation.
Two Seunghyuns, and Jiyong loved the one that wasn’t him. But therein lay the illusion: that Jiyong, standing over him, the heel of his boot digging into the soft, vulnerable concave of his stomach, would suddenly smile. As if to say, here is what you could have. Here I am.
“Little Seunghyun,” Jiyong said, suddenly, and he started, tried to pretend he hadn’t. Jiyong was still watching the snake, letting it wind through his middle and ring finger. “Tell the others to pack their bags.”
He shifted, glanced back at the figure on the porch. His face was obscured by smoke. “Me too?”
Jiyong looked at him then, a slow, considering gaze. “No,” he said. “No, you can stay.”
When he was almost at the house, Seunghyun stepped off the porch, moving toward Jiyong.
“Jiyong said-” he started, lifting his gaze.
“Whatever Jiyong has to say, he can say to me,” Seunghyun said, putting out his cigarette. He felt himself flush with resentment, watched through the screen door as Jiyong looked up at Seunghyun and started to speak.
In the end it was the last anyone saw of Seunghyun. Daesung and Youngbae were heading north in a day, but Seunghyun left Jiyong cradling his cigarette in the backyard and went upstairs to the room he and Jiyong shared. Jiyong stayed outside, lifting his eyes to the upper floor windows, and went in for dinner when called. When Seunghyun appeared with his suitcase, neither of them looked at the other, as if it were not a goodbye. When asked what he would do next, Seunghyun said, “Maybe I’ll sell furniture.”
Daesung and Youngbae left in the morning. In the afternoon, Jiyong, fixing a window, said, “Help me with this, Seunghyun.” No prefix, casual, as if he’d made a choice, and little Seunghyun - Seunghyun, now - went to him.
There was something people loved about Jiyong, potent as a drug, that made people forgive his sharp tongue, forget the ugly sides of him. That took a criminal and remade him in reverence, took a skinny boy from a nowhere town and made him a king. Children knew the stories about Kwon Jiyong, how he could kill a man with his bare hands, could shoot a moving target from ten metres away. After he died, people would make pilgrimages to the house he grew up in, stand in the room he was killed in, and would swear they could still feel his presence, a foreboding chill in the air. Jiyong believed in a lot of things - money, loyalty, and a shotgun - but he didn’t believe in sentiment, didn’t love anyone or anything the way he loved what he was, what he’d become.
Hyunseung was the snake in Eden, deceptively harmless until he had you clamped between his teeth. The bounty, Hyunseung kept saying, but he wasn’t listening. The idea of Jiyong caught, more than the idea of payoff, was what gripped him. Jiyong was like a wild animal - once bitten, twice violent, all teeth, savage and beautiful and fucking invincible. Jiyong dead he couldn’t even begin to imagine, and felt the beginnings of an itch. The glassy eyes and still mouth, fingers that couldn’t play with a knife, lips that wouldn’t make him want promises from. “We could do it,” Hyunseung said, and Seunghyun thought: no-but I could.
He watched Jiyong punch Hyunseung in the mouth, the blood and spit flecking on Jiyong’s knuckles and Hyunseung’s pale skin. The black spiral of Jiyong’s earring, curving out from the back of his earlobe in a loop, ended in a point near Jiyong’s jaw. Eventually Hyunseung stopped fighting back, each of Jiyong’s blows finding home the only sound. Another minute, two, and then he let go, sat back and looked at Hyunseung’s face with a tender, almost helpless expression, fingers touching his cooling, bloody mouth. As if he knew how to regret.
Then Jiyong looked up and stared at him. For months he would dream of this: looking down, afraid to meet Jiyong’s eye, and all the while Jiyong saw him like a mirror, looked into him and saw a lifeless reflection of himself, tangled with conflicting desires - Jiyong dead, Jiyong alive, Jiyong.
Jiyong laughed.
He’d studied the Kwon gang, could name each of its members and identify most of them before he’d met them, had collected news clippings and the short serials on their famous train robberies, knew which rumours were true and which weren’t. Knew that Youngbae came from Jiyong’s hometown, like something resurrected out of a past life; that Daesung always kept a battered copy of the Bible with him. Heard the rumours about Jiyong and Choi Seunghyun, seen that lingering, considerate gaze.
At the police department, it took ten minutes for someone to notice him. Boy, they called him, with a casual derision that made him straighten up, tear his eyes away from the window. “My name is Lee Seunghyun,” he said, paused deliberately, then: “I can give you the Kwon gang.”
For thirty minutes, he made explanations, furnished descriptions, drew maps, and abhorred the glass windows. Then the inspector leaned back in his chair and said pleasantly, “All right, kid.”
He learned of the capture of two members of the Kwon gang from Jiyong, who picked up the newspaper and said, casually, “Do you know anything about this?”
Seunghyun widened his eyes, scanning the headlines. Inspector credits capture to excellent work of Pinkertons, he read, with mingled relief and offence. “No,” he said, jaw twitching, and set the newspaper back down. He ducked into the inspector’s office again two days later, took off his hat and tipped his head back, waiting.
What Seunghyun didn’t expect was for him to laugh. “Did you think I was going to thank you?” He tapped out a cigarette, lit it, and continued. “I want Jiyong, and you’re going to give him to me.”
g-dragon/top, g-dragon/seungri, pg-13, 1540ⓦ
Note: Jesse James AU. Poem by Arkaye Kierulf.
IN THIS ROOM I WAS BORN.
AND I KNEW I WAS IN THE WRONG PLACE: THE WORLD.
I KNEW PAIN WAS TO COME.
I KNEW IT BY THE PERSISTENCE OF THE BLADE THAT CUT ME OUT.
I KNEW IT AS EVERY BABY BORN TO THE WORLD KNOWS IT: I CAME HERE TO DIE.
They would only ever remember him as the one who killed Kwon Jiyong, he realised. He would always recall it with the kind of cold, gripping miasma of an illness, the warmth of his gun and the fresh, point-blank splatter of Jiyong’s blood. The realisation made the satisfaction slip from it, the same way Jiyong’s inert form had crumpled to the floor effortlessly. Each time he relived it, which was often, he failed to notice that Jiyong’s eyes were already closed. Two months from now he would look down the barrel of Seunghyun’s gun and feel the same kind of acceptance, tinged with regret. And years from now, they would only remember Jiyong’s name. Forget, even, how he died. But before that-
The train shuddered along the path of the track, a freight of metal and steam, in the moonlight. The sound of the engine upset a murder of crows that alighted, noisily, amongst the trees.
Inside the train: the stifled sound of a baby crying; hushed, alarmed voices. A gunshot brooks silence, broken only by the harsh, frightened sobbing of a woman.
Jiyong sweeps in behind his gang, heading straight for the conductor’s carriage, affording only a glance by a young boy who gasps, “Kwon Jiyong,” before his father covers his mouth with a shaking hand, cradles the boy’s head to his chest. The links of his watch bite into his round, hairless cheek. He looks, despite himself, at the door Jiyong kicks open, slams shut.
Through the opaque window, stamped with the word “CONDUCTOR,” there are the shadowy figures of two men standing: Kwon Jiyong and Choi Seunghyun. These are familiar names, spoken in whispers and written in headlines, important names, wanted names. A clipping:
Kwon Jiyong, younger, is slight and pretty enough to be a girl. Jiyong is reckless, devil-may-care, and his voice is sharp and twanging. Choi Seunghyun, the elder of the two, is tall, imposing, and reticent. He has strong features, a sharp jaw and a deep, commanding voice. Neither of them are ever unarmed.
Between them kneels a third man, hands behind his head. The smoked glass makes the scene oneiric: silent, all three of them unmoving - and then the conductor is shot, and he hurries to drop his gaze. His hand has instinctively moved to cover his son’s eyes, his large hand clutching protectively, so that the boy whispers, father, I can’t breathe. With both hands, the child pulls his father’s fingers down, does what no one else on the train dares to, and watches the last train robbery of the Kwon gang.
He watched Jiyong watch the snake wind around his wrist, the dark emerald sinuous against the pale inside of his wrist, criss-crossed with blue veins.
When Seunghyun appeared, the crooked back door slamming back onto its frame, he could feel himself disappear. Jiyong didn’t react with either a smile or a word, and Seunghyun didn’t do anything except stand there, wood creaking when he leaned against the rail of the porch, lighter spitting and hissing to life. But Jiyong’s body responded to his presence with an alertness that no one else could wake up in him: with everyone else-with him, little Seunghyun, Jiyong was careless enough to be cruel. Liked to see him jealous, bitter, see his face contorted in pain and humiliation.
Two Seunghyuns, and Jiyong loved the one that wasn’t him. But therein lay the illusion: that Jiyong, standing over him, the heel of his boot digging into the soft, vulnerable concave of his stomach, would suddenly smile. As if to say, here is what you could have. Here I am.
“Little Seunghyun,” Jiyong said, suddenly, and he started, tried to pretend he hadn’t. Jiyong was still watching the snake, letting it wind through his middle and ring finger. “Tell the others to pack their bags.”
He shifted, glanced back at the figure on the porch. His face was obscured by smoke. “Me too?”
Jiyong looked at him then, a slow, considering gaze. “No,” he said. “No, you can stay.”
When he was almost at the house, Seunghyun stepped off the porch, moving toward Jiyong.
“Jiyong said-” he started, lifting his gaze.
“Whatever Jiyong has to say, he can say to me,” Seunghyun said, putting out his cigarette. He felt himself flush with resentment, watched through the screen door as Jiyong looked up at Seunghyun and started to speak.
In the end it was the last anyone saw of Seunghyun. Daesung and Youngbae were heading north in a day, but Seunghyun left Jiyong cradling his cigarette in the backyard and went upstairs to the room he and Jiyong shared. Jiyong stayed outside, lifting his eyes to the upper floor windows, and went in for dinner when called. When Seunghyun appeared with his suitcase, neither of them looked at the other, as if it were not a goodbye. When asked what he would do next, Seunghyun said, “Maybe I’ll sell furniture.”
Daesung and Youngbae left in the morning. In the afternoon, Jiyong, fixing a window, said, “Help me with this, Seunghyun.” No prefix, casual, as if he’d made a choice, and little Seunghyun - Seunghyun, now - went to him.
There was something people loved about Jiyong, potent as a drug, that made people forgive his sharp tongue, forget the ugly sides of him. That took a criminal and remade him in reverence, took a skinny boy from a nowhere town and made him a king. Children knew the stories about Kwon Jiyong, how he could kill a man with his bare hands, could shoot a moving target from ten metres away. After he died, people would make pilgrimages to the house he grew up in, stand in the room he was killed in, and would swear they could still feel his presence, a foreboding chill in the air. Jiyong believed in a lot of things - money, loyalty, and a shotgun - but he didn’t believe in sentiment, didn’t love anyone or anything the way he loved what he was, what he’d become.
Hyunseung was the snake in Eden, deceptively harmless until he had you clamped between his teeth. The bounty, Hyunseung kept saying, but he wasn’t listening. The idea of Jiyong caught, more than the idea of payoff, was what gripped him. Jiyong was like a wild animal - once bitten, twice violent, all teeth, savage and beautiful and fucking invincible. Jiyong dead he couldn’t even begin to imagine, and felt the beginnings of an itch. The glassy eyes and still mouth, fingers that couldn’t play with a knife, lips that wouldn’t make him want promises from. “We could do it,” Hyunseung said, and Seunghyun thought: no-but I could.
He watched Jiyong punch Hyunseung in the mouth, the blood and spit flecking on Jiyong’s knuckles and Hyunseung’s pale skin. The black spiral of Jiyong’s earring, curving out from the back of his earlobe in a loop, ended in a point near Jiyong’s jaw. Eventually Hyunseung stopped fighting back, each of Jiyong’s blows finding home the only sound. Another minute, two, and then he let go, sat back and looked at Hyunseung’s face with a tender, almost helpless expression, fingers touching his cooling, bloody mouth. As if he knew how to regret.
Then Jiyong looked up and stared at him. For months he would dream of this: looking down, afraid to meet Jiyong’s eye, and all the while Jiyong saw him like a mirror, looked into him and saw a lifeless reflection of himself, tangled with conflicting desires - Jiyong dead, Jiyong alive, Jiyong.
Jiyong laughed.
He’d studied the Kwon gang, could name each of its members and identify most of them before he’d met them, had collected news clippings and the short serials on their famous train robberies, knew which rumours were true and which weren’t. Knew that Youngbae came from Jiyong’s hometown, like something resurrected out of a past life; that Daesung always kept a battered copy of the Bible with him. Heard the rumours about Jiyong and Choi Seunghyun, seen that lingering, considerate gaze.
At the police department, it took ten minutes for someone to notice him. Boy, they called him, with a casual derision that made him straighten up, tear his eyes away from the window. “My name is Lee Seunghyun,” he said, paused deliberately, then: “I can give you the Kwon gang.”
For thirty minutes, he made explanations, furnished descriptions, drew maps, and abhorred the glass windows. Then the inspector leaned back in his chair and said pleasantly, “All right, kid.”
He learned of the capture of two members of the Kwon gang from Jiyong, who picked up the newspaper and said, casually, “Do you know anything about this?”
Seunghyun widened his eyes, scanning the headlines. Inspector credits capture to excellent work of Pinkertons, he read, with mingled relief and offence. “No,” he said, jaw twitching, and set the newspaper back down. He ducked into the inspector’s office again two days later, took off his hat and tipped his head back, waiting.
What Seunghyun didn’t expect was for him to laugh. “Did you think I was going to thank you?” He tapped out a cigarette, lit it, and continued. “I want Jiyong, and you’re going to give him to me.”