with open arms
luhan/xiumin, chen/suho ; ~3200 ; pg-13 ; highlight for warning: character death
written for exopromptmeme ; prompt: "the year is 2066. physical contact has been outlawed. hug dealers tenderly embrace people in the dead of night and shady people hold hands in dark streets."
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF KOREA INTERNAL INTELLIGENCE SECTION REPORT
Dated: July 16, 2067
Title: Open Arms Incident, 2066
Interview conducted by: Huang Zitao
The following is a transcript of an interview with Lu Han, the original perpetrator and organiser of this incident.
He is 28 years old, 178 centimetres tall, and quite underweight (according to his cell guards, he has been refusing to eat most of the food given to him). He is originally from China but has lived in Korea for sixteen years after fleeing persecution from the Chinese government (his family was one of the last practicers of the intimate actions that led to this incident). His daytime job is writing novels for the young adult generation; his books are quite popular and incidentally, convey the clean message of our government that is exactly the opposite of what his crimes suggest.
NOTE:
The subjects committed a heinous act, one that should never be repeated. To eradicate all traces of the heresy that occurred, it was entirely necessary to search the subjects’ places of residence and dispose of any belongings that hinted at their experiences or desires of such. Below is an excerpt from the subject Lu Han’s personal journal regarding one of the other subjects; it serves as proof that their possessions had to be destroyed.
“Jongdae dreams a lot. He dreams of stories he’s heard but never seen, the ones that nowadays have to be whispered on pieces of paper that are immediately afterwards crumpled and creased into illegibility. It seems so foreign, the idea of laying a finger on someone else, but in Jongdae’s dreams, it’s more natural than anything. He dreams of a stranger whose face he can never recall, a stranger that intertwines his fingers with his and smiles until Jongdae’s wishful reality dissolves and he opens his eyes to darkness. Every time, he’s left clutching the blankets, wrapping himself in them and wrinkling the fabric with desperation and sweat. Yet he’s still colder than ever.”
Whether this is actually true or just the musings of an author has been deemed irrelevant; it is still evidence containing ideas that have no purpose in our world.
INTERVIEW:
--How could you enact such a movement promoting causes that you write books against? Your words carry the exact meaning our government desires, but what you started has the message we’ve tried to destroy.
[laughs, pauses before speaking] Since I’m an author, why don’t I explain it to you in words I’ve written before.
Let’s think about the most common tea, the only kind common people can afford to buy and the kind that no one buys anymore. The leaves merely sit in their storage bags as long as they are left alone, but once poured into hot water, nothing can be done to prevent the spread of the flavour and aroma, and soon, everyone consumes them. Even if you take the dregs out of the pot, the flavour still remains and even if you can make yourself forget the taste, you still remember the feeling of revulsion in your mouth. [NOTE: the sugar shortage was at its high in the last few years leading up to this event and is still ongoing at the time of this report] Of course, in the context of the government, the tea leaves are the passions and emotions resulting from physical contact. I suppose it wouldn’t put me in any more trouble to tell you part of my personal interpretation now, even though you probably won’t understand it. Someone might as well hear it before I die, no?
The tea leaves are more like the government itself, I think. It used to be good and people used to appreciate it, but now essentially all it does is poison us with its hyper-concentrated control. People think that control is what keeps us from being savage animals. In a way, it does. Instead of acting as we are born to, we build and shape our society into what is supposed to be perfect. Yet, how many people realise that once we reach that perfection, we will be nothing but machines?
--Describe the conception of this idea.
I almost considered it the first year I arrived in Korea. I was all by myself and felt like I understood the word “lonely” better than anyone in the city - why would anyone have wanted to be friends with a skinny Chinese refugee that spends too long staring at his own fingers? Eventually I talked regularly with a few people that didn’t shun me, but I still felt like a sapling trying to secure roots in soil that had long since eroded away. Even after my writing started getting popular, I still felt like the seeds I was trying to plant kept blowing away in the wind.
So I decided to create my own warmth, my own flames that would nourish and not destroy.
I always lived near the edge of the city, the part that the government always says is “undergoing progress” but is really just the group of sleepy buildings that no one wants to call the slums. No one really wanted to spend the time or money to fix it, but that apathy and lack of surveillance made it perfect for me to fix up as I saw.
There had been one person that I had noticed when I first started working at the government’s literature department. I didn’t work closely with Minseok, but he was so polished and professional that I assumed he was in a high ranking position, one of the top editors or something. Later, I found out that he wasn’t, that he was just another cubicle filing boring administrative paperwork and other things that no one would ever look at again. He could have done a much better job than his superiors, but he was stuck and unfairly unrecognised. Even without talking to him, I could tell he was missing something too.
So one day I went up to his desk with an extra cup of coffee in hand. The cup was a family relic that I had managed to bring from China, and it was quite nice, porcelain with a painted flower on the side, faded slightly. He was surprised, of course, especially when I asked him what he thought of the word “blossom.”
“A flower, like the one painted here?” he asked. His voice was warm, like the coffee we were drinking but without any of the bitterness.
“Don’t you think people can blossom? Or the relationships between them?” I replied.
That was the first time I saw his eyes widen, although I think it was out of confusion. The next time was out of surprise, after we had talked over more cups of coffee and I invited him to the outskirts to eat.
We were in that area of the city remote enough that the stainless silver of the public underground trains had no stations within a kilometre. Most of the buildings were closed down, and even in the small parts that were purely residential for the very poorest, there was a similar hushed reservedness, as if the mere thought of living here was a crime in itself. Even so, there was a cluster of small flowers growing in a dusty crack in the pavement. They weren’t remarkably beautiful by general standards, but Minseok’s eyes were so round and joyful, filled with feelings that were a kind of beauty that I had never seen before.
“If these can blossom here, then I suppose anything can blossom. Even people, or relationships, like you said,” Minseok had remarked quietly, eyes sparkling shyly. That was when I decided that I would try this idea. Either way, there was only one thing to lose. Perhaps I wasn’t absolutely fearless, but it was quite close. Quite enough.
I only saw his eyes widen out of fear twice. The first was when I first suggested to him that we could reenact the stories, when I suggested how nice our fingers could look interlocked with each other, his hand in mine. [pauses for a long while] The second time was the few seconds between the roaring of the sirens, the realisation that we had been caught, and when the bullet shattered both the air and his aorta.
--Explain how you implemented this idea and the entire resulting network.
As I said, the outskirts were ideal. There was an area even more remote than my residence which happened to have plenty of twisting alleys and defunct street signs. Even though it was far away from the vast majority of the city population, I figured that only those who really wanted it would make the effort to come and those who were just curious in the validity of rumours wouldn’t be so keen on showing up whenever. To me, the extra hour or two was more than worth the few minutes of contact, of shadows on skin on skin and warmth lingering on fingertips and running through veins.
I knew a lot of people, even though I wasn’t close to any of them. There were so many, but I filtered through them quickly. I looked for the ones that had that extra sad sparkle in their eye, the one that meant they had something most people didn’t have: the thought that maybe they were missing more than an extra digit in their bank account, that maybe such a word as “lonely” exists.
There was a dance studio I walked by every day on the way to work, and through the glass windows I could see how consistently flat the choreography was. The teachers both had that listless shine, and one day I approached one of them, the Chinese one, and asked him if he had heard of [deleted], a partner dance originating from China that involved palm to palm touching. His eyes narrowed in recognition, although out loud he said it was too old-fashioned to be considered real, like rumours that were made up while dreaming. There was a piece of paper nearby, so I grabbed a pen and lightly sketched various stages of the dance that I remembered from my childhood. When he didn’t stop me and tell me that I was breaking the law by illustrating this kind of contact, I knew that he would do it. Zhang Yixing was willing, and eventually so was his coworker Kim Jongin. After all, didn’t there used to be a saying that people want what they can’t have?
I let them have it. One of my subordinates, the student named Oh Sehun, always came slightly closer to me when handing over papers and delivering messages - of course, we never touched in the office, but the distance between us, between him and other people, was slightly less than the norm. He was my first invite - I led him to Jongin, someone his age and build who could be a good match. I didn’t see too much of them in the shadows, but when Sehun thanked me he said that their shoulders fit well together. It sounded lovely, but I think I’d still prefer the fit of my arms around the shoulders of someone smaller than me. Someone that has a build that’s just that much less than mine but that supports me the best. Someone like Minseok.
--And the time you first brought the other main subjects of this case into it?
Jongdae was the only one that was my friend before I started this, and it was because he was my friend that I brought him into this. He used to be so chirpy and talkative when we first met, when we were younger, but in the last few years it’s been a little too easy to catch him staring into nothing with lonely stars in his eyes. They still sparkled, but at a temperature that was just below comfortable, like a cold breath on the back of your neck. Maybe it’s my fault for telling him the stories, but I really think it made his life better even though he won’t be able to live like that anymore.
We reached the streets just after dark. The air was as I had made it: a little less cold than a few years earlier, but still just as silent. Jongdae said the tremor in his chest fluttered a little faster, maybe to compensate for the lack of audible vibrations around him.
We turned into a narrow alley, one that was very easy to miss. It was surprisingly unremarkable, not clean or attractive in any way but not abandoned enough that layers of grime would cling to your fingers if you ran them along the side of the nearest building. We trudged forward over a few shattered bottles of wine and half-finished cigarette butts, and I wondered when Jongdae had become so fearless without hesitation.
I asked Jongdae, "You won't be too scared by this, right? You won't think it's unnatural or strange enough to tell anyone or anything?"
Normally Jongdae would make a crack about how he always thought I was unnatural and strange, but that was not the time or place. He could see that I was scared for him, and honestly he was probably scared for himself too even as he said, "Show me."
We twisted and turned our way even deeper into the rundown maze of tired cinderblocks until we stopped at the edge of an intersection between alleys. An old advertisement for cheap black bean noodles was still tacked onto a wall.
"Since you've never seen this before, it's best for you and your future partners if you see how it works first,” I told him.
"Partners?"
"Well, it's not quite like business partners, but you can think of it that way. You and another person both want something and you can help each other get it. In this case, it's not money, but touch and maybe even affection."
"Affection?"
"We'll get to that later. You have enough to take in right now."
"Okay?" Jongdae probably should have stopped asking one word questions.
I leaned around the corner and called out softly. "Minseok!"
The petite, boyish figure I was supposedly too familiar with emerged, black hair and pale blending into the faded poster behind him. Jongdae gasped; he told me later that it was because Minseok was the boy who used to live a floor above him, the boy who always did better than Jongdae in athletics and school and everything, a perfect boy that Jongdae never would have expected to be involved in this kind of business. Seeing someone so flawless able to do this made Jongdae feel slightly better, but there still remained a slight hitch in his breath that didn't have to do with the dirt in the air, he said.
Of course it wasn’t the first time we had done it, but I felt nervous as I stepped towards Minseok and reached for his fingers so I could clasp them and feel the soft lines on his palm. Perhaps it was because I was not used to it being a public display, even if public meant just one other person. It had happened before; we had showed Yixing, Jongin and the others, but I suppose I felt different because I was closer with Jongdae. I’m not sure. Not all feelings are meant to be explained anyways.
Jongdae would be able to explain that as well. He and Junmyeon were much closer than the others ever were. While sometimes Jongin and Yixing would exchange embraces instead of Jongin and Sehun, Jongdae and Junmyeon stayed with each other.
“There’s no point, because I know I won’t smile as hard when I’m with someone else. Even when I’m with you and you make those weird jokes that only Minseok and I laugh at, it’s not on the same level of wonderfulness as Junmyeon,” Jongdae told me. I never had to explain what affection was to him since he found it on his own, probably even faster than I did once he met Junmyeon.
I suggested they go together because I thought their smiles almost matched. When I saw Junmyeon smile for the first time, something about the crinkles at the edges of his eyes and the whiteness of his smile instantly reminded me of Jongdae. In the end, I think they subconsciously shifted their smiles towards each other’s. Maybe it was because they were the primary reason for each other’s happiness. Maybe that’s why when Junmyeon smiled, he seemed more like Jongdae; he was thinking of Jongdae and so Jongdae shone out of him and the sparkles in his eyes.
--You’re being interviewed because you’re behind this event. Explain why you think we only chose select people in this event as main subjects.
Obviously Minseok was with me. I think Jongdae and Junmyeon were main subjects because they were closer too. There was not just a simple need for physical belonging with them, but an emotional thread that intertwined tightly enough to push them beyond. Beyond what? Again, I’m not sure. But there was more than one night where they fell asleep in a shadowy corner of cinderblocks and woke up to the faint morning light and their arms wrapped around each other’s torso. Jongdae said it was because of a time like that where they discovered it. Junmyeon moves in his sleep apparently, and he woke up to find his nose resting on Jongdae’s cheek and Jongdae giggling from the warm breath on his skin. He said that there had never been a nicer feeling, but that was before he shifted and their lips touched for the first time. After that, it was never an accident.
I never tried that with Minseok, and I think that was one of my only regrets. There was one time where I rested my chin on his shoulder, but he was still nervous then. He was still used to trying to be perfect, and even though he had already broken so many rules he wasn’t comfortable with doing everything possible in rebellion. Eventually the curve of his neck and shoulder shaped to fit me exactly and we leaned into each other, but that was all. I don’t think he knew all of what Jongdae and Junmyeon did, and I didn’t want to make him any more uncomfortable. I was still happy too. Even if just one of his fingertips brushed against my skin, it was enough to keep me warm even if I could see the puffs of our breath in the air.
I would have been happy with that forever. But does forever exist for anyone?
Bringing this idea to life made me think that stories really could happen in real life. Things I thought were just dreams or fables actually occurred, and sometimes I stared at the ceiling and wondered if magic existed. Then, when I heard the sirens, I realised that the only magic was the government letting me think I could get away with anything. It let me take it, then it took it back from me. And now you will take me.
The subject pushes in his chair as he gets up, smiling darkly as the metal legs screech against the floor. Before he exits the room, he looks back and whispers a phrase in Chinese not quite under his breath: 世界已经结束了。
[MEANING: “the world has already ended.”]
i'm sorry this is late compared to the original post date of the prompt ;; i really liked the idea but i kept changing it bc this was partially an experiment for me.. i wanted to try writing in this format! i hope everything comes across !! also i felt like changing some spellings to the international way even though i'm american sorry if i forgot any heheh
written for exopromptmeme ; prompt: "the year is 2066. physical contact has been outlawed. hug dealers tenderly embrace people in the dead of night and shady people hold hands in dark streets."
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF KOREA INTERNAL INTELLIGENCE SECTION REPORT
Dated: July 16, 2067
Title: Open Arms Incident, 2066
Interview conducted by: Huang Zitao
The following is a transcript of an interview with Lu Han, the original perpetrator and organiser of this incident.
He is 28 years old, 178 centimetres tall, and quite underweight (according to his cell guards, he has been refusing to eat most of the food given to him). He is originally from China but has lived in Korea for sixteen years after fleeing persecution from the Chinese government (his family was one of the last practicers of the intimate actions that led to this incident). His daytime job is writing novels for the young adult generation; his books are quite popular and incidentally, convey the clean message of our government that is exactly the opposite of what his crimes suggest.
NOTE:
The subjects committed a heinous act, one that should never be repeated. To eradicate all traces of the heresy that occurred, it was entirely necessary to search the subjects’ places of residence and dispose of any belongings that hinted at their experiences or desires of such. Below is an excerpt from the subject Lu Han’s personal journal regarding one of the other subjects; it serves as proof that their possessions had to be destroyed.
“Jongdae dreams a lot. He dreams of stories he’s heard but never seen, the ones that nowadays have to be whispered on pieces of paper that are immediately afterwards crumpled and creased into illegibility. It seems so foreign, the idea of laying a finger on someone else, but in Jongdae’s dreams, it’s more natural than anything. He dreams of a stranger whose face he can never recall, a stranger that intertwines his fingers with his and smiles until Jongdae’s wishful reality dissolves and he opens his eyes to darkness. Every time, he’s left clutching the blankets, wrapping himself in them and wrinkling the fabric with desperation and sweat. Yet he’s still colder than ever.”
Whether this is actually true or just the musings of an author has been deemed irrelevant; it is still evidence containing ideas that have no purpose in our world.
INTERVIEW:
--How could you enact such a movement promoting causes that you write books against? Your words carry the exact meaning our government desires, but what you started has the message we’ve tried to destroy.
[laughs, pauses before speaking] Since I’m an author, why don’t I explain it to you in words I’ve written before.
Let’s think about the most common tea, the only kind common people can afford to buy and the kind that no one buys anymore. The leaves merely sit in their storage bags as long as they are left alone, but once poured into hot water, nothing can be done to prevent the spread of the flavour and aroma, and soon, everyone consumes them. Even if you take the dregs out of the pot, the flavour still remains and even if you can make yourself forget the taste, you still remember the feeling of revulsion in your mouth. [NOTE: the sugar shortage was at its high in the last few years leading up to this event and is still ongoing at the time of this report] Of course, in the context of the government, the tea leaves are the passions and emotions resulting from physical contact. I suppose it wouldn’t put me in any more trouble to tell you part of my personal interpretation now, even though you probably won’t understand it. Someone might as well hear it before I die, no?
The tea leaves are more like the government itself, I think. It used to be good and people used to appreciate it, but now essentially all it does is poison us with its hyper-concentrated control. People think that control is what keeps us from being savage animals. In a way, it does. Instead of acting as we are born to, we build and shape our society into what is supposed to be perfect. Yet, how many people realise that once we reach that perfection, we will be nothing but machines?
--Describe the conception of this idea.
I almost considered it the first year I arrived in Korea. I was all by myself and felt like I understood the word “lonely” better than anyone in the city - why would anyone have wanted to be friends with a skinny Chinese refugee that spends too long staring at his own fingers? Eventually I talked regularly with a few people that didn’t shun me, but I still felt like a sapling trying to secure roots in soil that had long since eroded away. Even after my writing started getting popular, I still felt like the seeds I was trying to plant kept blowing away in the wind.
So I decided to create my own warmth, my own flames that would nourish and not destroy.
I always lived near the edge of the city, the part that the government always says is “undergoing progress” but is really just the group of sleepy buildings that no one wants to call the slums. No one really wanted to spend the time or money to fix it, but that apathy and lack of surveillance made it perfect for me to fix up as I saw.
There had been one person that I had noticed when I first started working at the government’s literature department. I didn’t work closely with Minseok, but he was so polished and professional that I assumed he was in a high ranking position, one of the top editors or something. Later, I found out that he wasn’t, that he was just another cubicle filing boring administrative paperwork and other things that no one would ever look at again. He could have done a much better job than his superiors, but he was stuck and unfairly unrecognised. Even without talking to him, I could tell he was missing something too.
So one day I went up to his desk with an extra cup of coffee in hand. The cup was a family relic that I had managed to bring from China, and it was quite nice, porcelain with a painted flower on the side, faded slightly. He was surprised, of course, especially when I asked him what he thought of the word “blossom.”
“A flower, like the one painted here?” he asked. His voice was warm, like the coffee we were drinking but without any of the bitterness.
“Don’t you think people can blossom? Or the relationships between them?” I replied.
That was the first time I saw his eyes widen, although I think it was out of confusion. The next time was out of surprise, after we had talked over more cups of coffee and I invited him to the outskirts to eat.
We were in that area of the city remote enough that the stainless silver of the public underground trains had no stations within a kilometre. Most of the buildings were closed down, and even in the small parts that were purely residential for the very poorest, there was a similar hushed reservedness, as if the mere thought of living here was a crime in itself. Even so, there was a cluster of small flowers growing in a dusty crack in the pavement. They weren’t remarkably beautiful by general standards, but Minseok’s eyes were so round and joyful, filled with feelings that were a kind of beauty that I had never seen before.
“If these can blossom here, then I suppose anything can blossom. Even people, or relationships, like you said,” Minseok had remarked quietly, eyes sparkling shyly. That was when I decided that I would try this idea. Either way, there was only one thing to lose. Perhaps I wasn’t absolutely fearless, but it was quite close. Quite enough.
I only saw his eyes widen out of fear twice. The first was when I first suggested to him that we could reenact the stories, when I suggested how nice our fingers could look interlocked with each other, his hand in mine. [pauses for a long while] The second time was the few seconds between the roaring of the sirens, the realisation that we had been caught, and when the bullet shattered both the air and his aorta.
--Explain how you implemented this idea and the entire resulting network.
As I said, the outskirts were ideal. There was an area even more remote than my residence which happened to have plenty of twisting alleys and defunct street signs. Even though it was far away from the vast majority of the city population, I figured that only those who really wanted it would make the effort to come and those who were just curious in the validity of rumours wouldn’t be so keen on showing up whenever. To me, the extra hour or two was more than worth the few minutes of contact, of shadows on skin on skin and warmth lingering on fingertips and running through veins.
I knew a lot of people, even though I wasn’t close to any of them. There were so many, but I filtered through them quickly. I looked for the ones that had that extra sad sparkle in their eye, the one that meant they had something most people didn’t have: the thought that maybe they were missing more than an extra digit in their bank account, that maybe such a word as “lonely” exists.
There was a dance studio I walked by every day on the way to work, and through the glass windows I could see how consistently flat the choreography was. The teachers both had that listless shine, and one day I approached one of them, the Chinese one, and asked him if he had heard of [deleted], a partner dance originating from China that involved palm to palm touching. His eyes narrowed in recognition, although out loud he said it was too old-fashioned to be considered real, like rumours that were made up while dreaming. There was a piece of paper nearby, so I grabbed a pen and lightly sketched various stages of the dance that I remembered from my childhood. When he didn’t stop me and tell me that I was breaking the law by illustrating this kind of contact, I knew that he would do it. Zhang Yixing was willing, and eventually so was his coworker Kim Jongin. After all, didn’t there used to be a saying that people want what they can’t have?
I let them have it. One of my subordinates, the student named Oh Sehun, always came slightly closer to me when handing over papers and delivering messages - of course, we never touched in the office, but the distance between us, between him and other people, was slightly less than the norm. He was my first invite - I led him to Jongin, someone his age and build who could be a good match. I didn’t see too much of them in the shadows, but when Sehun thanked me he said that their shoulders fit well together. It sounded lovely, but I think I’d still prefer the fit of my arms around the shoulders of someone smaller than me. Someone that has a build that’s just that much less than mine but that supports me the best. Someone like Minseok.
--And the time you first brought the other main subjects of this case into it?
Jongdae was the only one that was my friend before I started this, and it was because he was my friend that I brought him into this. He used to be so chirpy and talkative when we first met, when we were younger, but in the last few years it’s been a little too easy to catch him staring into nothing with lonely stars in his eyes. They still sparkled, but at a temperature that was just below comfortable, like a cold breath on the back of your neck. Maybe it’s my fault for telling him the stories, but I really think it made his life better even though he won’t be able to live like that anymore.
We reached the streets just after dark. The air was as I had made it: a little less cold than a few years earlier, but still just as silent. Jongdae said the tremor in his chest fluttered a little faster, maybe to compensate for the lack of audible vibrations around him.
We turned into a narrow alley, one that was very easy to miss. It was surprisingly unremarkable, not clean or attractive in any way but not abandoned enough that layers of grime would cling to your fingers if you ran them along the side of the nearest building. We trudged forward over a few shattered bottles of wine and half-finished cigarette butts, and I wondered when Jongdae had become so fearless without hesitation.
I asked Jongdae, "You won't be too scared by this, right? You won't think it's unnatural or strange enough to tell anyone or anything?"
Normally Jongdae would make a crack about how he always thought I was unnatural and strange, but that was not the time or place. He could see that I was scared for him, and honestly he was probably scared for himself too even as he said, "Show me."
We twisted and turned our way even deeper into the rundown maze of tired cinderblocks until we stopped at the edge of an intersection between alleys. An old advertisement for cheap black bean noodles was still tacked onto a wall.
"Since you've never seen this before, it's best for you and your future partners if you see how it works first,” I told him.
"Partners?"
"Well, it's not quite like business partners, but you can think of it that way. You and another person both want something and you can help each other get it. In this case, it's not money, but touch and maybe even affection."
"Affection?"
"We'll get to that later. You have enough to take in right now."
"Okay?" Jongdae probably should have stopped asking one word questions.
I leaned around the corner and called out softly. "Minseok!"
The petite, boyish figure I was supposedly too familiar with emerged, black hair and pale blending into the faded poster behind him. Jongdae gasped; he told me later that it was because Minseok was the boy who used to live a floor above him, the boy who always did better than Jongdae in athletics and school and everything, a perfect boy that Jongdae never would have expected to be involved in this kind of business. Seeing someone so flawless able to do this made Jongdae feel slightly better, but there still remained a slight hitch in his breath that didn't have to do with the dirt in the air, he said.
Of course it wasn’t the first time we had done it, but I felt nervous as I stepped towards Minseok and reached for his fingers so I could clasp them and feel the soft lines on his palm. Perhaps it was because I was not used to it being a public display, even if public meant just one other person. It had happened before; we had showed Yixing, Jongin and the others, but I suppose I felt different because I was closer with Jongdae. I’m not sure. Not all feelings are meant to be explained anyways.
Jongdae would be able to explain that as well. He and Junmyeon were much closer than the others ever were. While sometimes Jongin and Yixing would exchange embraces instead of Jongin and Sehun, Jongdae and Junmyeon stayed with each other.
“There’s no point, because I know I won’t smile as hard when I’m with someone else. Even when I’m with you and you make those weird jokes that only Minseok and I laugh at, it’s not on the same level of wonderfulness as Junmyeon,” Jongdae told me. I never had to explain what affection was to him since he found it on his own, probably even faster than I did once he met Junmyeon.
I suggested they go together because I thought their smiles almost matched. When I saw Junmyeon smile for the first time, something about the crinkles at the edges of his eyes and the whiteness of his smile instantly reminded me of Jongdae. In the end, I think they subconsciously shifted their smiles towards each other’s. Maybe it was because they were the primary reason for each other’s happiness. Maybe that’s why when Junmyeon smiled, he seemed more like Jongdae; he was thinking of Jongdae and so Jongdae shone out of him and the sparkles in his eyes.
--You’re being interviewed because you’re behind this event. Explain why you think we only chose select people in this event as main subjects.
Obviously Minseok was with me. I think Jongdae and Junmyeon were main subjects because they were closer too. There was not just a simple need for physical belonging with them, but an emotional thread that intertwined tightly enough to push them beyond. Beyond what? Again, I’m not sure. But there was more than one night where they fell asleep in a shadowy corner of cinderblocks and woke up to the faint morning light and their arms wrapped around each other’s torso. Jongdae said it was because of a time like that where they discovered it. Junmyeon moves in his sleep apparently, and he woke up to find his nose resting on Jongdae’s cheek and Jongdae giggling from the warm breath on his skin. He said that there had never been a nicer feeling, but that was before he shifted and their lips touched for the first time. After that, it was never an accident.
I never tried that with Minseok, and I think that was one of my only regrets. There was one time where I rested my chin on his shoulder, but he was still nervous then. He was still used to trying to be perfect, and even though he had already broken so many rules he wasn’t comfortable with doing everything possible in rebellion. Eventually the curve of his neck and shoulder shaped to fit me exactly and we leaned into each other, but that was all. I don’t think he knew all of what Jongdae and Junmyeon did, and I didn’t want to make him any more uncomfortable. I was still happy too. Even if just one of his fingertips brushed against my skin, it was enough to keep me warm even if I could see the puffs of our breath in the air.
I would have been happy with that forever. But does forever exist for anyone?
Bringing this idea to life made me think that stories really could happen in real life. Things I thought were just dreams or fables actually occurred, and sometimes I stared at the ceiling and wondered if magic existed. Then, when I heard the sirens, I realised that the only magic was the government letting me think I could get away with anything. It let me take it, then it took it back from me. And now you will take me.
The subject pushes in his chair as he gets up, smiling darkly as the metal legs screech against the floor. Before he exits the room, he looks back and whispers a phrase in Chinese not quite under his breath: 世界已经结束了。
[MEANING: “the world has already ended.”]
i'm sorry this is late compared to the original post date of the prompt ;; i really liked the idea but i kept changing it bc this was partially an experiment for me.. i wanted to try writing in this format! i hope everything comes across !! also i felt like changing some spellings to the international way even though i'm american sorry if i forgot any heheh