(no subject)
vacancy signal
changmin-centric, pg-13, 1780ⓦ
Note: Based on Green Gloves by The National (explanation).
It’s more about trying to remember someone and sort of be them [...] You’re actually recreating them somehow in order to know them better. You miss them so much you have to become them.
- Matt Berninger
In the back of the closet, Changmin finds one of Jaejoong's old zip-up hoodies, with a tiny hole in the sleeve from moths. When he tugs it on, it's a little tight in all the familiar places, and he pulls the hood over his head with two hands.
It's raining outside, and the air is thick-knit with smog and clouds, drawing in close around Changmin. He ducks into the convenience store, the doorway rain-tracked and dirty. Inside his pockets, he plays with six 500 yen coins, picking them up and dropping them, over and over, scanning the display of beverages until he hears Junsu say, "I want strawberry milk."
The bottles leave a cold, damp spot on his jacket front when he carries them to the counter.
They fly back to Seoul, the next day. He fits earphones into his ears, so he doesn't have to hear the snap snap snap of paparazzi and the screaming fans, the flurry of hands. When they reach their apartment, Changmin drops his bags in the hallway, partly because he's tired, but mostly to be irritating, so that Yunho will say, yah, Changmin-ah, no vitriol behind it.
All of the rooms have the empty, un-lived in look they get when they've been away, too clean and untouched. When he skims a tabletop in passing, his fingers come away clean, but the television remote is still balanced on the arm of the couch, a cup still left out on the counter by accident, almost as if there is someone invisible at home.
The blanket on Yoochun's bed has been neatly tucked in with the sheets, like an army bunk. Changmin tugs them out, slides in under the blanket and turns his face into the pillow.
It's midday, but Changmin falls asleep in ten minutes. When he's shaken awake, Yunho's hand is on his shoulder, his body a vague outline in the dark. "You want dinner?" Yunho says. The rest of the apartment is quiet.
If you're buying, Changmin almost says, but there's a weariness around Yunho's eyes, different from the usual, that Changmin feels guilty for, as if he had something to do with it. He says out loud, "Sure." His voice almost cracks on the word, his throat dry and his jaw stiff.
He pushes himself out of bed, shrugs a coat onto his shoulders and lets Yunho hold the door open for him. There's a heavy, sour taste on his tongue, like metal. It reminds him of Charon's obol, like their brisk stride is a cut through the watery darkness. They stop at an intersection, the only people on the sidewalk. Next to him in the orange-yellow glow of a streetlight, Yunho's face looks almost ashen. He leans in for a moment, but then the light changes and Yunho shifts away, unaware.
There is a video on his phone that he watches, sometimes. It begins with fumbling, a flash of orange-yellow light, and Junsu's voice, saying in English, "Okay, okay, go." It focuses on Jaejoong, his face awash with the glow of candles, the rest of them in a circle around him. Jaejoong waves his hands like a conductor while they sing happy birthday to him, their faces wavering in and out of view.
Yoochun plants a sloppy kiss on Jaejoong's cheek when the song ends, and Junsu's disembodied hyena laugh sounds as Jaejoong makes a face of exaggerated disgust. He looks at Yunho while he does it, Changmin realises on the fourth or fifth replay, and slowly rewinds, replays, rewinds - Jaejoong's pout, the wrinkle of his nose, the way neither of them look away until a noise maker - his noise maker, he remembers with a start - makes a sharp, sudden sound.
There are other things he remembers, faintly, as he falls asleep, like slides on a carousel projector: Yoochun sneaking chocolate out of the cupboard, the peace that unfolds in Jaejoong when he plays the piano, Junsu's face, red and cramped with effort as he's arm wrestling Yunho.
He sleeps without dreaming.
He studies them all online, more than he used to. He watches the shadows underneath their eyes wax and wane, the thin sliver of a smile on Yunho's face captured by a news camera, Jaejoong's name splashed over headlines.
On stage, he sings with a voice sharper, more hoarse and nasal than usual; his throat burns with the effort. He watches the comments stack up online, and amid the flurry of oppa must not be feeling well, one reads, doesn't Changmin oppa sound like Junsu oppa? He shuts down his computer, leans back in his bed and stares at the ceiling. His stomach feels light, and he remembers suddenly that he hasn't eaten in six hours.
When they ask how he prepared for the new album in an interview, the recitation rolls off his tongue smoothly: "We worked hard to show a more mature side with a different image and vocals." It's only when Yunho's delivering his line that he remembers: Changmin oppa sounds like Junsu oppa.
Beside the stage, Changmin plays with the clasp of his necklace, singing his lines under his breath to his newly-shined shoes. He's metering out Junsu's lines in taps when he thinks, oh- and then it's time, he's climbing the steps up to the stage while the screen flashes to say, MAXIMUM.
They clamber into a club afterwards, pouring in like a flood, young and wild and free. Some time later, Kyuhyun has a brogue curled around Changmin's ankle, and he's smiling glassily across the booth at Jungmo, who has slid out into the thick of the club. Changmin presses the heel of his hand to one ear, his phone plastered to the other. "No," he laughs, as Kyuhyun pushes himself upright with a shoulder and reaches for his glass again. He doesn't remember hearing the phone ring, but he also doesn't remember which glass is his.
"I have to go, I'm babysitting Kyuhyunnie," Changmin says, after a pause; he reaches out and nudges Kyuhyun's knuckles away from his glass, punctuating it with a smirk. Kyuhyun attempts a scowl that looks suspiciously like a pout, and mouths, who is it? He reaches for the phone, touching cold glass for a moment before Changmin shifts away and laughs, jostling Kyuhyun with an elbow. Jaejoong, he mouths back, before he says out loud, "Yeah, I will. Bye."
Kyuhyun frowns minutely over the rim of his glass as Changmin pushes his phone back onto the table, screen dark. In the morning, his phone's battery is dead, and it flashes 5:42 p.m. at him for a brief moment when he plugs it into an empty socket on Yunho's side of the hotel room.
Changmin can hear the clock ticking, and he taps the blank page in front of him, tilting the chair back onto its back legs. He can hear the soft scratch of a pen on paper, Yoochun shifting, cocooned in layers of wool and cotton. The 2 a.m. chill is distracting; he uses the eraser of his pencil to puncture out a simple, unappealing melody on the keyboard. Yoochun sniffs, blows his nose: he's caught a cold again, sometime between their last two international flights.
They end up in the living room after another hour, falling asleep after a hushed, exhaustive argument over a muted television game show without captions. When Yunho wakes up, Changmin and Yoochun are lounging on the couch, sharing a bag of shrimp chips for breakfast. "I thought you didn't like those," he says.
Changmin shrugs. "I like them." Yoochun did, too. They always justified buying food on the housekeeping budget as long as two of them liked it. It's just past noon; on the television, a middle-aged woman is brewing ginger tea, toting it as a cure for stomachaches. He changes the channel, lands on a historical drama.
"Move over," Yunho says, patting at the haphazard sprawl of Changmin's legs, tangled up in a thin blanket.
"They're mine," Changmin says automatically, fingers closing like a vice around the neck of the bag. He doesn't look away from the television, still flicking through channels with obtuse stabs at the channel up button, but he draws his feet up anyway, and burrows them underneath Yunho after he's sunken into the couch cushions like a flagging ship.
In the bathroom, the last glass bottle of Jaejoong's cologne is nearly empty. Changmin wields it with a fragile economy, sprays twice and lets Jaejoong's scent descend on him like a cloud.
They're always paired off in the photoshoots like a diptych, all mirrored angles and long legs and lofty glances, Yunho always just a little softer, Changmin that slightest bit harder. Yunho's back is to the camera when Changmin steps closer, so that he can feel Yunho shifting inside his suit as Changmin reaches up, tucks his hands into the pockets of his trousers.
They've done this enough times that they know their angles, all the different permutations of poses. Yunho's meant to turn, give them his side profile, but Yunho, instead, breathes sharply and turns his head to look at Changmin.
He dissects the look for days afterwards, the bewildered yearning, wistful and helpless and beautiful, like the sun and the moon, a tragedy. In the glossy pages of the magazine, their faces are blank, arrogance mass-produced and stocked on shelves of 7-11s, no ephemera by which to remember that expression. It's his, to keep.
Sometimes Changmin thinks it can all be read in body language: two men in a room, one of whom loves the other, one of whom loves another. Sometimes his body carries it like a whisper, sometimes it carries it like a scream. Their lives are like two trains, travelling in opposite directions on the same track, every vis-à-vis like an accident: Yunho passing by a room where Changmin sits, reading; Changmin hearing the sounds of a murmured telephone conversation through the fourth wall of his bedroom. Crowded together in smaller spaces - a new flat, their manager's sedan - they're somehow less intimate, more like hollow men. On stage, they are watery images of each other, mirrored in imperfect symmetry.
Changmin can trace the years on Yunho's face, the child-like curves that have faded into sharpness, the smooth, unbroken lines that trace out his bone structure, interrupted by fear and worry and hurt. He could fit his mouth to the furrow in his brow, slick a wet thumb over the creases at the corner of his eyes.
"I worry about you," Yunho says, sitting across the kitchen table in the dim stove light. Oh, Changmin thinks, shakily, there. The crinkle of Yunho's features, for me, for me, for me.
changmin-centric, pg-13, 1780ⓦ
Note: Based on Green Gloves by The National (explanation).
It’s more about trying to remember someone and sort of be them [...] You’re actually recreating them somehow in order to know them better. You miss them so much you have to become them.
- Matt Berninger
In the back of the closet, Changmin finds one of Jaejoong's old zip-up hoodies, with a tiny hole in the sleeve from moths. When he tugs it on, it's a little tight in all the familiar places, and he pulls the hood over his head with two hands.
It's raining outside, and the air is thick-knit with smog and clouds, drawing in close around Changmin. He ducks into the convenience store, the doorway rain-tracked and dirty. Inside his pockets, he plays with six 500 yen coins, picking them up and dropping them, over and over, scanning the display of beverages until he hears Junsu say, "I want strawberry milk."
The bottles leave a cold, damp spot on his jacket front when he carries them to the counter.
They fly back to Seoul, the next day. He fits earphones into his ears, so he doesn't have to hear the snap snap snap of paparazzi and the screaming fans, the flurry of hands. When they reach their apartment, Changmin drops his bags in the hallway, partly because he's tired, but mostly to be irritating, so that Yunho will say, yah, Changmin-ah, no vitriol behind it.
All of the rooms have the empty, un-lived in look they get when they've been away, too clean and untouched. When he skims a tabletop in passing, his fingers come away clean, but the television remote is still balanced on the arm of the couch, a cup still left out on the counter by accident, almost as if there is someone invisible at home.
The blanket on Yoochun's bed has been neatly tucked in with the sheets, like an army bunk. Changmin tugs them out, slides in under the blanket and turns his face into the pillow.
It's midday, but Changmin falls asleep in ten minutes. When he's shaken awake, Yunho's hand is on his shoulder, his body a vague outline in the dark. "You want dinner?" Yunho says. The rest of the apartment is quiet.
If you're buying, Changmin almost says, but there's a weariness around Yunho's eyes, different from the usual, that Changmin feels guilty for, as if he had something to do with it. He says out loud, "Sure." His voice almost cracks on the word, his throat dry and his jaw stiff.
He pushes himself out of bed, shrugs a coat onto his shoulders and lets Yunho hold the door open for him. There's a heavy, sour taste on his tongue, like metal. It reminds him of Charon's obol, like their brisk stride is a cut through the watery darkness. They stop at an intersection, the only people on the sidewalk. Next to him in the orange-yellow glow of a streetlight, Yunho's face looks almost ashen. He leans in for a moment, but then the light changes and Yunho shifts away, unaware.
There is a video on his phone that he watches, sometimes. It begins with fumbling, a flash of orange-yellow light, and Junsu's voice, saying in English, "Okay, okay, go." It focuses on Jaejoong, his face awash with the glow of candles, the rest of them in a circle around him. Jaejoong waves his hands like a conductor while they sing happy birthday to him, their faces wavering in and out of view.
Yoochun plants a sloppy kiss on Jaejoong's cheek when the song ends, and Junsu's disembodied hyena laugh sounds as Jaejoong makes a face of exaggerated disgust. He looks at Yunho while he does it, Changmin realises on the fourth or fifth replay, and slowly rewinds, replays, rewinds - Jaejoong's pout, the wrinkle of his nose, the way neither of them look away until a noise maker - his noise maker, he remembers with a start - makes a sharp, sudden sound.
There are other things he remembers, faintly, as he falls asleep, like slides on a carousel projector: Yoochun sneaking chocolate out of the cupboard, the peace that unfolds in Jaejoong when he plays the piano, Junsu's face, red and cramped with effort as he's arm wrestling Yunho.
He sleeps without dreaming.
He studies them all online, more than he used to. He watches the shadows underneath their eyes wax and wane, the thin sliver of a smile on Yunho's face captured by a news camera, Jaejoong's name splashed over headlines.
On stage, he sings with a voice sharper, more hoarse and nasal than usual; his throat burns with the effort. He watches the comments stack up online, and amid the flurry of oppa must not be feeling well, one reads, doesn't Changmin oppa sound like Junsu oppa? He shuts down his computer, leans back in his bed and stares at the ceiling. His stomach feels light, and he remembers suddenly that he hasn't eaten in six hours.
When they ask how he prepared for the new album in an interview, the recitation rolls off his tongue smoothly: "We worked hard to show a more mature side with a different image and vocals." It's only when Yunho's delivering his line that he remembers: Changmin oppa sounds like Junsu oppa.
Beside the stage, Changmin plays with the clasp of his necklace, singing his lines under his breath to his newly-shined shoes. He's metering out Junsu's lines in taps when he thinks, oh- and then it's time, he's climbing the steps up to the stage while the screen flashes to say, MAXIMUM.
They clamber into a club afterwards, pouring in like a flood, young and wild and free. Some time later, Kyuhyun has a brogue curled around Changmin's ankle, and he's smiling glassily across the booth at Jungmo, who has slid out into the thick of the club. Changmin presses the heel of his hand to one ear, his phone plastered to the other. "No," he laughs, as Kyuhyun pushes himself upright with a shoulder and reaches for his glass again. He doesn't remember hearing the phone ring, but he also doesn't remember which glass is his.
"I have to go, I'm babysitting Kyuhyunnie," Changmin says, after a pause; he reaches out and nudges Kyuhyun's knuckles away from his glass, punctuating it with a smirk. Kyuhyun attempts a scowl that looks suspiciously like a pout, and mouths, who is it? He reaches for the phone, touching cold glass for a moment before Changmin shifts away and laughs, jostling Kyuhyun with an elbow. Jaejoong, he mouths back, before he says out loud, "Yeah, I will. Bye."
Kyuhyun frowns minutely over the rim of his glass as Changmin pushes his phone back onto the table, screen dark. In the morning, his phone's battery is dead, and it flashes 5:42 p.m. at him for a brief moment when he plugs it into an empty socket on Yunho's side of the hotel room.
Changmin can hear the clock ticking, and he taps the blank page in front of him, tilting the chair back onto its back legs. He can hear the soft scratch of a pen on paper, Yoochun shifting, cocooned in layers of wool and cotton. The 2 a.m. chill is distracting; he uses the eraser of his pencil to puncture out a simple, unappealing melody on the keyboard. Yoochun sniffs, blows his nose: he's caught a cold again, sometime between their last two international flights.
They end up in the living room after another hour, falling asleep after a hushed, exhaustive argument over a muted television game show without captions. When Yunho wakes up, Changmin and Yoochun are lounging on the couch, sharing a bag of shrimp chips for breakfast. "I thought you didn't like those," he says.
Changmin shrugs. "I like them." Yoochun did, too. They always justified buying food on the housekeeping budget as long as two of them liked it. It's just past noon; on the television, a middle-aged woman is brewing ginger tea, toting it as a cure for stomachaches. He changes the channel, lands on a historical drama.
"Move over," Yunho says, patting at the haphazard sprawl of Changmin's legs, tangled up in a thin blanket.
"They're mine," Changmin says automatically, fingers closing like a vice around the neck of the bag. He doesn't look away from the television, still flicking through channels with obtuse stabs at the channel up button, but he draws his feet up anyway, and burrows them underneath Yunho after he's sunken into the couch cushions like a flagging ship.
In the bathroom, the last glass bottle of Jaejoong's cologne is nearly empty. Changmin wields it with a fragile economy, sprays twice and lets Jaejoong's scent descend on him like a cloud.
They're always paired off in the photoshoots like a diptych, all mirrored angles and long legs and lofty glances, Yunho always just a little softer, Changmin that slightest bit harder. Yunho's back is to the camera when Changmin steps closer, so that he can feel Yunho shifting inside his suit as Changmin reaches up, tucks his hands into the pockets of his trousers.
They've done this enough times that they know their angles, all the different permutations of poses. Yunho's meant to turn, give them his side profile, but Yunho, instead, breathes sharply and turns his head to look at Changmin.
He dissects the look for days afterwards, the bewildered yearning, wistful and helpless and beautiful, like the sun and the moon, a tragedy. In the glossy pages of the magazine, their faces are blank, arrogance mass-produced and stocked on shelves of 7-11s, no ephemera by which to remember that expression. It's his, to keep.
Sometimes Changmin thinks it can all be read in body language: two men in a room, one of whom loves the other, one of whom loves another. Sometimes his body carries it like a whisper, sometimes it carries it like a scream. Their lives are like two trains, travelling in opposite directions on the same track, every vis-à-vis like an accident: Yunho passing by a room where Changmin sits, reading; Changmin hearing the sounds of a murmured telephone conversation through the fourth wall of his bedroom. Crowded together in smaller spaces - a new flat, their manager's sedan - they're somehow less intimate, more like hollow men. On stage, they are watery images of each other, mirrored in imperfect symmetry.
Changmin can trace the years on Yunho's face, the child-like curves that have faded into sharpness, the smooth, unbroken lines that trace out his bone structure, interrupted by fear and worry and hurt. He could fit his mouth to the furrow in his brow, slick a wet thumb over the creases at the corner of his eyes.
"I worry about you," Yunho says, sitting across the kitchen table in the dim stove light. Oh, Changmin thinks, shakily, there. The crinkle of Yunho's features, for me, for me, for me.