like a diamond in the sky
Title: like a diamond in the sky
Pairing: kaisoo
Rating: pg-13
Genre: romance, slight!angst
Length: 2500~w
Summary: It takes a second to forgive, and years to forget, and forever to stop loving. Jongin learns this the hard way.
like a diamond in the sky
Nights in Tokyo are miniature paintings of alcohol-hazed, pointless lifestyles. Jongin thinks this as he loosens his tie, staring up at the night sky, wondering what year it had been when the stars had first begun disappearing. The colorful lights of the city life blink and blur under him, and he takes a long drag on his cigarette, watching the smoke swirl in whimsical rings and fading into the night sky.
"Mister.”
Jongin turns, cigarette hanging between his lips, and sees a teenage girl standing at the door that lead to stairs away from the roof. Her hands are stuck deep in the pockets of her shorts, wearing an indignant expression on her face. She walks quickly over to him, leaning against the metal railing and looking at him expectantly.
“Well?”
“What do you want?” Jongin asks gruffly, running a hand over his face and grimacing as he remembers that he needs to shave.
“You promised you’ll tell me your story.”
Jongin snorts, staring off into the night and watching the cars speed into oblivion. The noises of the city are muffled, and he finds the soft sounds of engines and voice strangely calming.
“Mister,” she begins again, voice edging towards a whine.
“Kids like you should be studying,” Jongin interrupts, finishing his cigarette and crushing it beneath his shoe.
The dying sparks are vaguely symbolic of everything he’s lost.
“School will be out soon,” she says, tugging on the ends of Jonign’s brown, corduroy suit jacket.
It’s an old thing, long out of fashion, but Jongin never found the need to throw it out. It is comfortable, and the scent of it reminds him of something that he’d rather forget. But, he finds that forgetting takes more courage than remembering, and he's a coward.
“What do you want to know?” He says finally, feeling a light summer breeze blow his hair away from his eyes.
“Everything,” she answers simply, hopping onto the railing so that the entire world hung below her, waiting for her one mistake to send her tumbling from the pinnacle. Much like what Jongin had done.
“That’s dangerous,” he warns, scoffing when she rolls her eyes at him. “You want to hear my love story?” He asks.
She nods, a spark appearing in her eyes as she leans towards him eagerly. Her long hair flies behind her, catching the wind and then settling on her shoulders.
“Well,” he begins, tapping out another cigarette before thinking better of it and tucking the box back in his pocket. “It’s a very tragic one.” He laughs. “But very romantic and very dramatic and very great. Probably the best love story you’ll ever hear in your entire life.”
He pauses, and he squints at the night sky, trying to catch a glimpse of one of the many stars that were hiding behind the veil of human desires and human cruelty. Familiar squeezes at his heart that he had tried to forget for so long reappears, and Jongin wishes that someone would punch him in the gut instead. She waits patiently as Jongin collects his thoughts, pulling up bitter and sweet memories alike from the abyss that was his past.
“He was sixteen,” he begins, voice quiet and hoarse. “”He was sixteen, and I was fifteen, and we were almost nearly an entire year apart.” Jongin smiles as he remembers the shock he saw on his face when he found out that their birthdays were only one day apart.
“He made me call him hyung, and he was everything in my life. He was my teacher, my friend, my mentor, my family, my lover, my star, and my angel. He sang, and I danced, and it was a match made in heaven. We kissed between the shelves of our school library and made love in his bedroom after he finished his physics homework. He was the brains that kept me out of trouble, and I was the heart that loved him and loved us blindly. When he was in my arms, I felt like I had nothing to lose. He was my world.
“When we graduated from high school, he went to a prestigious university and studied optical physics, while I enrolled in a police academy. In his second year, we put in a deposit for an apartment and began living together. I thought life couldn’t get any better than that.” Jongin laughs, looking down at his dull shoes, kicking lightly at the railing. He notices that the bars are rusting.
“I thought that was what heaven was. Every morning, I would wake up to him, and we would make breakfast together. Then, he’d go to class, and I’d go to training, and everything was perfect. We couldn’t have lunch together, but we had dinner together every day, whether it was at home or out. It’s an ideal life, right? You’d think nothing could go wrong?” Jongin laughs again, and the sound is strangely bitter.
“But then, he stopped meeting me for dinner. He’d text me and tell me to not wait for him and to go home without him, and I did. After a while-it went on for a few months-I got frustrated and just a little bit suspicious. I waited outside his school that night, waiting for him to come out. It was cold, I remember. Almost near New Years. He walked out with another man.
“I honestly couldn’t believe my eyes, and I followed them, making various excuses to myself. They’re just friends, they’re just friends, I kept repeating to myself. But then, the other man put his arm around his shoulders and leaned too close for them to be just friends, and I snapped. I ran up to them and grabbed his arm, demanding in a voice too loud to be socially acceptable to know what was happening. I didn’t care about the curious eyes that stopped and stared, nor did I care about the urgent voice of that man. I was very angry, and I screamed a lot of things I didn’t mean. The whole time, he merely looked at me, and kept saying ‘You don’t understand.’
“‘I didn’t understand,’ I remember saying. ‘I didn’t understand, but I do now. I never knew our love was so shallow.’ I remember saying. ‘I can’t believe I was the only one in love,’ I remember saying.
“He had grabbed my arm, but I pushed him away and walked home alone. He didn’t run after me, and I fell asleep to bottles of soju that rivaled the bitterness in my heart and dried tear tracks on my cheeks. He didn’t come home that night.”
Jongin pauses to catch his breath, only noticing that he is crying when she nudges him lightly, handing him her handkerchief. He nods his thanks and ruffles her hair affectionately, laughing when she scowls at him. He closes his eyes, swallowing thickly as scenes from events that stayed stained in his mind from guilt flashes again and again in front of his eyes.
“I just got an offer to join the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, and I decided on a whim to take up the offer, calling my teacher when I woke up in the morning. He returned when I began packing, and he didn’t mention anything from the night before. He asked if I was going somewhere, and I said yes, Tokyo. He stopped talking then, only saying goodbye and wishing me a safe flight in a small, tired voice. It made me angry. I thought he wanted me to leave, that he was happy that I was gone. When I thought back in later years, I guess I should’ve noticed that his eyes weren’t as bright as they normally were. They never became as bright as before. I often wonder if it was my fault.”
“You saw him again?” She asks. It is the first time he interrupted, and Jongin looks at her with surprise. He had forgotten she was there. He nods.
“About half a year later, I returned to Seoul because I was homesick and because I wanted to see him. I couldn’t forgive him, but I couldn’t forget him either, and his presence in my mind just made my life a living hell. I had celebrated my birthday alone for the first time since I was fifteen, and I spent the day under the snow, risking hypothermia, as I tried to recall his voice when he would sing happy birthday to the two of us. When I returned, the first thing I did was revisit the places we frequented, even though the pain seemed to increase with every moment spent reliving our memories.
“I saw him at one of the restaurants we used to go. It wasn’t very surprising, but even after six months, I wasn’t ready to see him. He was alone though, and I think that made it harder. It was almost as if everything was like before-before that night-but it wasn’t. Something had changed, something big, and it was irrevocable. He knew, and I knew, but he still approached me and asked how I was doing and tried to smile through his pain and discomfort. I told him I was fine, and then I bought him a meal, and we ate in silence. Later, he called someone to pick him up, and it was the man from that night. When he saw me, his eyes narrowed, and he immediately ushered him into his car. Before he slid in himself, he looked at me and told me to meet him outside his old school at seven o’clock. I’m still not sure why I had agreed, but I somehow found myself wandering there when six forty-five arrived.
“When I arrived, he was already there, and as soon as he saw me, he punched me in the jaw. He called me many things, all of them negative, and I was really confused and really pissed off, because after all, didn’t he take him away from me? He stole him from me, and now he was calling me a bastard. I fought back.
“I grabbed him by the collar and let everything I’ve been feeling the last half a year pour out of me. I thought nothing could stop me from rearranging his face and making him feel an inkling of what I had to go through, but then, he said, ‘Kyungsoo’s dying.’
“I stopped then, and I remember falling backwards, staring at him wide-eyed from the ground. He stood there panting and glaring at me for a long while, and I could only meet his eyes, his words resounding over and over again in my head. Suddenly, he looked behind me, and I heard a painfully familiar voice calling out an unfamiliar name. It was him, and he ran up to us, apologizing to me profusely and scolding him lightly, almost like how he used to scold me.
“Then, he began to walk away, and I woke up from my paralysis. I stood up and asked him if it was true, if what he said was true, and he stopped walking. He said no, but I knew he was lying, so I told him that he was, but he kept saying no, no, and I knew he was crying. I could’ve left then. I could’ve left him crying, letting him feel the pain I had felt half a year ago, but he probably felt more than I back then too. So, I did something without thinking, because in this relationship, I was always the one doing things without thinking I grabbed him, and kissed him, and hugged him, and it all just felt too right. He was mine, he was forever going to be mine, and I told him that I wasn’t ever going to let him go.”
Jongin stops again, and he shows no indication of continuing, He mimics her pose and leans against the railing, head back as he stares at the starless sky, wondering if he was looking down on them right now.
“So, did you?”
He sighs. “I didn’t. Not until the last moment. At the last moment, I realized that he was an angel, my angel, and angels belonged with God in Heaven, so I had to let him go. He looked so peaceful when I let him go, with is eyes closed and fingers wrapped around mine, almost like when I first met him, a decade ago. His lips were still warm when I kissed them for the last time, even when his heart had stopped beating.”
Jongin chuckles. “The end,” he says lightly. “Quite a story, huh?”
“Quite,” she replies, voice a whisper, looking at him in awe. “And then you returned to Tokyo?”
“I returned to Tokyo and resumed my job as part of the police force, but I figured I wasn’t fit for the job. After a couple of years, I quit and began teaching dance at an academy.”
Silence falls between the two of them before she says, “And here you are.”
Jongin grins, and a ghost of his younger self seems to appear. “And here I am.” He turns towards the railing and towards Tokyo at night again, and spreads his arms.
“Here I am! Are you looking at me? Are you thinking of me?” Jongin screams into the night, his voice echoing through the tall buildings and dying traffic.
“I’m sure he is,” she says softly. “If he loved you as much as you loved, no,” she corrects herself, “love him, then he is.”
Jongin looks at her with a sort of grateful surprise, and offers her a genuine smile, one of those that made one feel free of burdens and free of pain and free of unshed tears.
“It’s getting late,” Jongin says, a hint of affection touching his voice. “You should get going.”
She looks as if she’s about to protest, but catches the wistful look on Jongin’s face-almost as if something was summoning him back into the recesses of his mind, back into his past-and hops off the rail.
“Will you be here tomorrow?” She asks, edging towards the door.
He shrugs. “I dunno. Maybe.”
She points a finger at him. “You better be,” she calls. “I want to hear more stories.”
She waves one last time before disappearing down the steps, and Jongin turns to the sky.
A single star winks at him, and he stares at it for a moment, speechless. Then, his face breaks into a smile, and he shakes his head, laughing. He tugs out his wallet and flips it open, gazing at the familiar face under the starlight and moonlight and haze of human dreams pieced back together after much heartbreak and tears. The lights of Tokyo blink off slowly below me, but he doesn’t move, eyes closed as he clutches the photograph between his fingers, worn with age.
For a moment, he thinks he can almost hear Kyungsoo’s voice saying, “I’ll love you until the end.”
Pairing: kaisoo
Rating: pg-13
Genre: romance, slight!angst
Length: 2500~w
Summary: It takes a second to forgive, and years to forget, and forever to stop loving. Jongin learns this the hard way.
like a diamond in the sky
Nights in Tokyo are miniature paintings of alcohol-hazed, pointless lifestyles. Jongin thinks this as he loosens his tie, staring up at the night sky, wondering what year it had been when the stars had first begun disappearing. The colorful lights of the city life blink and blur under him, and he takes a long drag on his cigarette, watching the smoke swirl in whimsical rings and fading into the night sky.
"Mister.”
Jongin turns, cigarette hanging between his lips, and sees a teenage girl standing at the door that lead to stairs away from the roof. Her hands are stuck deep in the pockets of her shorts, wearing an indignant expression on her face. She walks quickly over to him, leaning against the metal railing and looking at him expectantly.
“Well?”
“What do you want?” Jongin asks gruffly, running a hand over his face and grimacing as he remembers that he needs to shave.
“You promised you’ll tell me your story.”
Jongin snorts, staring off into the night and watching the cars speed into oblivion. The noises of the city are muffled, and he finds the soft sounds of engines and voice strangely calming.
“Mister,” she begins again, voice edging towards a whine.
“Kids like you should be studying,” Jongin interrupts, finishing his cigarette and crushing it beneath his shoe.
The dying sparks are vaguely symbolic of everything he’s lost.
“School will be out soon,” she says, tugging on the ends of Jonign’s brown, corduroy suit jacket.
It’s an old thing, long out of fashion, but Jongin never found the need to throw it out. It is comfortable, and the scent of it reminds him of something that he’d rather forget. But, he finds that forgetting takes more courage than remembering, and he's a coward.
“What do you want to know?” He says finally, feeling a light summer breeze blow his hair away from his eyes.
“Everything,” she answers simply, hopping onto the railing so that the entire world hung below her, waiting for her one mistake to send her tumbling from the pinnacle. Much like what Jongin had done.
“That’s dangerous,” he warns, scoffing when she rolls her eyes at him. “You want to hear my love story?” He asks.
She nods, a spark appearing in her eyes as she leans towards him eagerly. Her long hair flies behind her, catching the wind and then settling on her shoulders.
“Well,” he begins, tapping out another cigarette before thinking better of it and tucking the box back in his pocket. “It’s a very tragic one.” He laughs. “But very romantic and very dramatic and very great. Probably the best love story you’ll ever hear in your entire life.”
He pauses, and he squints at the night sky, trying to catch a glimpse of one of the many stars that were hiding behind the veil of human desires and human cruelty. Familiar squeezes at his heart that he had tried to forget for so long reappears, and Jongin wishes that someone would punch him in the gut instead. She waits patiently as Jongin collects his thoughts, pulling up bitter and sweet memories alike from the abyss that was his past.
“He was sixteen,” he begins, voice quiet and hoarse. “”He was sixteen, and I was fifteen, and we were almost nearly an entire year apart.” Jongin smiles as he remembers the shock he saw on his face when he found out that their birthdays were only one day apart.
“He made me call him hyung, and he was everything in my life. He was my teacher, my friend, my mentor, my family, my lover, my star, and my angel. He sang, and I danced, and it was a match made in heaven. We kissed between the shelves of our school library and made love in his bedroom after he finished his physics homework. He was the brains that kept me out of trouble, and I was the heart that loved him and loved us blindly. When he was in my arms, I felt like I had nothing to lose. He was my world.
“When we graduated from high school, he went to a prestigious university and studied optical physics, while I enrolled in a police academy. In his second year, we put in a deposit for an apartment and began living together. I thought life couldn’t get any better than that.” Jongin laughs, looking down at his dull shoes, kicking lightly at the railing. He notices that the bars are rusting.
“I thought that was what heaven was. Every morning, I would wake up to him, and we would make breakfast together. Then, he’d go to class, and I’d go to training, and everything was perfect. We couldn’t have lunch together, but we had dinner together every day, whether it was at home or out. It’s an ideal life, right? You’d think nothing could go wrong?” Jongin laughs again, and the sound is strangely bitter.
“But then, he stopped meeting me for dinner. He’d text me and tell me to not wait for him and to go home without him, and I did. After a while-it went on for a few months-I got frustrated and just a little bit suspicious. I waited outside his school that night, waiting for him to come out. It was cold, I remember. Almost near New Years. He walked out with another man.
“I honestly couldn’t believe my eyes, and I followed them, making various excuses to myself. They’re just friends, they’re just friends, I kept repeating to myself. But then, the other man put his arm around his shoulders and leaned too close for them to be just friends, and I snapped. I ran up to them and grabbed his arm, demanding in a voice too loud to be socially acceptable to know what was happening. I didn’t care about the curious eyes that stopped and stared, nor did I care about the urgent voice of that man. I was very angry, and I screamed a lot of things I didn’t mean. The whole time, he merely looked at me, and kept saying ‘You don’t understand.’
“‘I didn’t understand,’ I remember saying. ‘I didn’t understand, but I do now. I never knew our love was so shallow.’ I remember saying. ‘I can’t believe I was the only one in love,’ I remember saying.
“He had grabbed my arm, but I pushed him away and walked home alone. He didn’t run after me, and I fell asleep to bottles of soju that rivaled the bitterness in my heart and dried tear tracks on my cheeks. He didn’t come home that night.”
Jongin pauses to catch his breath, only noticing that he is crying when she nudges him lightly, handing him her handkerchief. He nods his thanks and ruffles her hair affectionately, laughing when she scowls at him. He closes his eyes, swallowing thickly as scenes from events that stayed stained in his mind from guilt flashes again and again in front of his eyes.
“I just got an offer to join the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, and I decided on a whim to take up the offer, calling my teacher when I woke up in the morning. He returned when I began packing, and he didn’t mention anything from the night before. He asked if I was going somewhere, and I said yes, Tokyo. He stopped talking then, only saying goodbye and wishing me a safe flight in a small, tired voice. It made me angry. I thought he wanted me to leave, that he was happy that I was gone. When I thought back in later years, I guess I should’ve noticed that his eyes weren’t as bright as they normally were. They never became as bright as before. I often wonder if it was my fault.”
“You saw him again?” She asks. It is the first time he interrupted, and Jongin looks at her with surprise. He had forgotten she was there. He nods.
“About half a year later, I returned to Seoul because I was homesick and because I wanted to see him. I couldn’t forgive him, but I couldn’t forget him either, and his presence in my mind just made my life a living hell. I had celebrated my birthday alone for the first time since I was fifteen, and I spent the day under the snow, risking hypothermia, as I tried to recall his voice when he would sing happy birthday to the two of us. When I returned, the first thing I did was revisit the places we frequented, even though the pain seemed to increase with every moment spent reliving our memories.
“I saw him at one of the restaurants we used to go. It wasn’t very surprising, but even after six months, I wasn’t ready to see him. He was alone though, and I think that made it harder. It was almost as if everything was like before-before that night-but it wasn’t. Something had changed, something big, and it was irrevocable. He knew, and I knew, but he still approached me and asked how I was doing and tried to smile through his pain and discomfort. I told him I was fine, and then I bought him a meal, and we ate in silence. Later, he called someone to pick him up, and it was the man from that night. When he saw me, his eyes narrowed, and he immediately ushered him into his car. Before he slid in himself, he looked at me and told me to meet him outside his old school at seven o’clock. I’m still not sure why I had agreed, but I somehow found myself wandering there when six forty-five arrived.
“When I arrived, he was already there, and as soon as he saw me, he punched me in the jaw. He called me many things, all of them negative, and I was really confused and really pissed off, because after all, didn’t he take him away from me? He stole him from me, and now he was calling me a bastard. I fought back.
“I grabbed him by the collar and let everything I’ve been feeling the last half a year pour out of me. I thought nothing could stop me from rearranging his face and making him feel an inkling of what I had to go through, but then, he said, ‘Kyungsoo’s dying.’
“I stopped then, and I remember falling backwards, staring at him wide-eyed from the ground. He stood there panting and glaring at me for a long while, and I could only meet his eyes, his words resounding over and over again in my head. Suddenly, he looked behind me, and I heard a painfully familiar voice calling out an unfamiliar name. It was him, and he ran up to us, apologizing to me profusely and scolding him lightly, almost like how he used to scold me.
“Then, he began to walk away, and I woke up from my paralysis. I stood up and asked him if it was true, if what he said was true, and he stopped walking. He said no, but I knew he was lying, so I told him that he was, but he kept saying no, no, and I knew he was crying. I could’ve left then. I could’ve left him crying, letting him feel the pain I had felt half a year ago, but he probably felt more than I back then too. So, I did something without thinking, because in this relationship, I was always the one doing things without thinking I grabbed him, and kissed him, and hugged him, and it all just felt too right. He was mine, he was forever going to be mine, and I told him that I wasn’t ever going to let him go.”
Jongin stops again, and he shows no indication of continuing, He mimics her pose and leans against the railing, head back as he stares at the starless sky, wondering if he was looking down on them right now.
“So, did you?”
He sighs. “I didn’t. Not until the last moment. At the last moment, I realized that he was an angel, my angel, and angels belonged with God in Heaven, so I had to let him go. He looked so peaceful when I let him go, with is eyes closed and fingers wrapped around mine, almost like when I first met him, a decade ago. His lips were still warm when I kissed them for the last time, even when his heart had stopped beating.”
Jongin chuckles. “The end,” he says lightly. “Quite a story, huh?”
“Quite,” she replies, voice a whisper, looking at him in awe. “And then you returned to Tokyo?”
“I returned to Tokyo and resumed my job as part of the police force, but I figured I wasn’t fit for the job. After a couple of years, I quit and began teaching dance at an academy.”
Silence falls between the two of them before she says, “And here you are.”
Jongin grins, and a ghost of his younger self seems to appear. “And here I am.” He turns towards the railing and towards Tokyo at night again, and spreads his arms.
“Here I am! Are you looking at me? Are you thinking of me?” Jongin screams into the night, his voice echoing through the tall buildings and dying traffic.
“I’m sure he is,” she says softly. “If he loved you as much as you loved, no,” she corrects herself, “love him, then he is.”
Jongin looks at her with a sort of grateful surprise, and offers her a genuine smile, one of those that made one feel free of burdens and free of pain and free of unshed tears.
“It’s getting late,” Jongin says, a hint of affection touching his voice. “You should get going.”
She looks as if she’s about to protest, but catches the wistful look on Jongin’s face-almost as if something was summoning him back into the recesses of his mind, back into his past-and hops off the rail.
“Will you be here tomorrow?” She asks, edging towards the door.
He shrugs. “I dunno. Maybe.”
She points a finger at him. “You better be,” she calls. “I want to hear more stories.”
She waves one last time before disappearing down the steps, and Jongin turns to the sky.
A single star winks at him, and he stares at it for a moment, speechless. Then, his face breaks into a smile, and he shakes his head, laughing. He tugs out his wallet and flips it open, gazing at the familiar face under the starlight and moonlight and haze of human dreams pieced back together after much heartbreak and tears. The lights of Tokyo blink off slowly below me, but he doesn’t move, eyes closed as he clutches the photograph between his fingers, worn with age.
For a moment, he thinks he can almost hear Kyungsoo’s voice saying, “I’ll love you until the end.”