avarice (1/2)
avarice
big bang; g-dragon/seungri; 11 500 words; r
jiyong knows what vices are. he has a lot of experience with them. he knows what it’s like when you can’t stay away from something: cigarettes, maybe, or caffeine, even though you know it’s destroying you. it’s starting to feel like seungri is a vice. (the devil wears prada au)
% originally for kpop_ficmix; remix of beautiful mess by vvipforseungri
% [warnings] unhealthy/emotionally abusive relationship; alcohol abuse; possibly infidelity, depending on your view of the situations
% [notes]it became a the devil wears prada AU thanks to this scene from the film and the storm scene from the original fic
% for some reason, this made perfect sense to me at the time. however, you don't have to have seen/read TDWP to understand the fic
% the quoted song is the hills by the weeknd
% i've not written a big bang fic in literally years i'm so sorry
% i wrote this as a pinch-hit in literally 5 days. it's a product of sheer unedited panic.
% twitter // masterlist if you don't hate me by the time this is over
% dedicated to randomkyuu: my garbage brain twin and constant partner in crime
% now crossposted to ao3!
Jiyong gets used to what four AM looks like out Seungri’s window.
He gets used to the volume of the ebb and flow of traffic on the street below Seungri's apartment, the particular sequence of buildings visible in the distance, the pattern of the moonlight filtering through the open slats of the window blinds to highlight scattered patches of the blankets draped over them. He gets used to the warmth of Seungri’s body beside his, the sound of Seungri’s breathing always slightly out of time with his own, the feeling of Seungri’s soft hair brushing his neck when Seungri rolls over in his sleep and nuzzles his way closer to Jiyong. He gets used to watching the neon red of the bedside clock count up to the next hour, minute by minute, shifting restlessly between sheets that are always a bit too starchy for his comfort.
It’s nothing like four AM out Jiyong’s own window, where the sky is closer and the city lights are brighter through the floor-to-ceiling glass; where there’s no one to be out of sync with, no neon red numbers approaching the socially acceptable point for the escape he doesn’t have to make. But somehow, four AM out Jiyong’s window becomes more and more of a rare occurrence.
Jiyong gets used to what four AM looks like out Seungri’s window. And slowly, he gets used to Seungri.
This is when he realises everything about Seungri is a mistake.
Jiyong could’ve avoided Seungri so easily. Seungri is just a cute blonde barista in a small coffee shop Jiyong stops into on his way to work on a frigid November morning, smiling at Jiyong so brightly that Jiyong finally has to ask what the hell he could be so damn happy about at eight in the morning on a Thursday.
"It’s my last day here," Seungri replies, still smiling. "I just got a job at an advertising firm. Now I'll be doing graphic design."
And it would be so very, very simple for Jiyong not to bring Seungri into his life. For instance, he could choose not to smile back. He could give Seungri his order in a detached monotone, not with a little upwards intonation inviting further conversation. He could go back to flipping through the glossy Sonia Rykiel lookbook in his hands, distracting himself with distorted variations on argyle and garish shades of mauve, instead of leaning on the counter and watching the smiling blonde barista make his coffee. He could say something besides, "You should celebrate your new job. Go out or something." He could say nothing at all. Or he could do absolutely anything besides scribble his number on a napkin, slide it across the counter to Seungri and say, "If you do decide to go out tonight, let me know."
But Jiyong doesn’t avoid Seungri, because Jiyong loves playing.
The problem is, Jiyong plays to win.
It’s part of a larger pattern of behaviour. Jiyong spends his days creating small universes, all of his own design. He begins with a concept - just a few words tossed at him by an art director in a meeting - and develops a plane of existence based on it. He populates these with people, overlays them with fabrics and fills them in with colours. He sets up the scenes, draping and arranging and tugging and tousling until he’s made the perfect split-second frame for the camera to capture: his own personal world, trapped inside one shiny page.
From late fall. Edgy glamour. Feature Diane von Furstenberg, he creates a twisted forest with long-legged models as the trees, bent at unnatural angles and tangled in metallic scarves.
From spring ready-to-wear. Light and airy. Feature Oscar de la Renta, he creates an idyllic meadow and places a girl in it, her lace dress blending into the mist like a gradient until she appears to be vanishing into it thread by thread.
From resort. Black and white. Feature Marchesa, he creates a strikingly funeral-esque scene and somehow doesn’t get fired.
When Jiyong’s work is done, his one-page worlds are shut between the covers of Runway Korea, the country’s top fashion magazine, and placed onto shelves all over the globe. There, they wait to be opened and pull unsuspecting interlopers down the rabbit hole. Inevitably, they will end up on countless lists of the year’s best fashion editorials. Jiyong’s team will groan, not entirely joking, that this isn’t enough compensation for putting up with Jiyong’s insatiable perfectionism.
But it’s undeniable. Jiyong is very good what he does. Jiyong is an expert at making something sick out of something beautiful, and convincing the world to love it.
Jiyong doesn’t expect much from Seungri: an awkward greeting that ends when Seungri runs out of words, a few drinks downed as punctuation for awkwardly constructed sentences, a little friction between them on the dance floor and a quick fuck back at Seungri’s place. The bare minimum. He meets Seungri at the bar of the small club Seungri picked; he’s generally late to things like this.
“Hi,” Seungri says. Without his barista apron, he has a much more muscular body than Jiyong expected. His eyes are teasing, and they scan Jiyong just a little too slowly. Jiyong already wants to grab him by the hair and crush their mouths together. “Sorry I didn’t get you anything. I don’t know what you like to drink.”
“It doesn’t really matter,” says Jiyong, and pulls him to the dance floor.
Seungri is a good dancer. He moves his hips like he knows he’s capable of driving Jiyong insane, and he is. They only make it in the door of Seungri’s apartment before Jiyong pins him to the wall and kisses him until they’re both breathless and clutching at each other’s hair and clothes.
“You still smell like coffee,” Jiyong says, when Seungri pulls away to fumble with his belt. It’s a pointless observation, but Seungri laughs.
“Hopefully I won’t have that problem as a graphic designer. Pixels don’t smell like anything.”
Seungri’s smile is mesmerising.
Jiyong shoves Seungri onto the bed so hard the frame slams into the wall, pinning Seungri’s arms over his head and straddling him. Seungri gasps Jiyong’s name like his voice was made to say it, and his body reacts to Jiyong’s touch like it was programmed to respond. Jiyong rides him fast and rough, leaving him grasping at the sheets and gripping Jiyong’s hips, then slips out the door fifteen minutes after Seungri falls asleep.
Jiyong never plans to see Seungri again. He discovered several heartbreaks ago that he likes loving much less than playing. He dismisses the notification from Seungri’s thanks for last night text, and sets his phone back down amidst pencil sketches of thorny vines interspersed with printed pictures of ivy-coloured Louboutin pumps and scribbled notes reading maybe some iron gates. But when he sees its follow-up, How should I celebrate my first day of freedom? he finds his finger hesitating over the notification.
No one has to know, Jiyong thinks.
He leaves Seungri’s apartment at 3AM with Seungri’s cologne mixed in with his own and a song ringing in his ears: the hills have eyes, the hills have eyes.
The project winding its way around Jiyong’s desk in a long chain of pencil thorns, red-heeled shoes and messy scrawls is an editorial called “midsummer, slightly vintage, feature Valentino”. These are the words of Teddy, the art director. Jiyong doesn’t like that working title very much, but he hasn’t got anything better.
Just outside his office door, his dangerously stressed assistant Hanbin is in the middle of an hour-long circular debate with his phone, attempting to track down a hat Queen Elizabeth II wore back in 1980 that Jiyong has decided is critical to the success of the project. By now, Hanbin’s impending mental breakdown is familiar background noise.
It stops abruptly when Seunghyun saunters in, shutting the door behind him. “Jiyong. You finally succeeded in getting me demoted.”
Jiyong looks up from the wrought iron gates he’s sketching and raises an eyebrow at Seunghyun, who has for some reason seen fit to barge into his office and disrupt his questionable productivity. Seunghyun’s hair has been freshly dyed toothpaste teal, and it clashes aggressively with his maroon suit. As a fellow stylist, he should really know better. “I didn’t do anything. And doing makeup for one editorial is not a permanent demotion.”
“It’s for your editorial.”
“It wasn’t my fault.” Jiyong frowns. “Teddy said the last photoshoot you styled was, quote, “way too circus freak”. He tried to keep it from going in the magazine, but it had Hyuna in it, so Editor-in-Chief Yang made him put it back in.”
“They scorn that which they do not understand,” says Seunghyun, and trips over the Givenchy shoebox Jiyong sticks his foot around the desk to kick into his path. He pulls a chair up in front of Jiyong’s desk nonetheless. “So, what do you have?”
“Just this.” Jiyong shoves his mess of sketches, photos and notes across the desk. By now, the pencil thorns span three pages. Five different pictures of the same shoes are taped to them, along with Queen Elizabeth II and her hat. The scribbles fill every centimeter of the paper not already occupied with stream-of-consciousness observations.
“Hmm.” Seunghyun scans the pages, mimicking Jiyong’s earlier eyebrow raise. “This is completely incoherent. But I can still figure out what to do with it.”
“You’re the best. Sometimes,” Jiyong quickly amends. “Now get out of my office. And please, if you have to wear that suit with that hair, at least get a teal pocket square to tie things together.”
“Request denied.” Seunghyun kicks the shoebox back towards Jiyong as he gets up, heading for the door without moving the chair back to its original spot. “If you need me, I’ll be designing circus freak makeup to ruin your ideas.”
When Seunghyun opens the door, Hanbin is still on the phone. Judging by the quiver in his voice, he’s near tears. Jiyong gets the feeling they’re going to have to proceed without the hat.
“Stay here tonight.”
Seungri has an incredibly comfortable mattress, and the late Sunday morning sun coming in the window is shining just the right amount of warmth on Jiyong’s naked back. This is the only reason Jiyong is still here. It has nothing to do with Seungri’s fingers running through his hair, his head resting in Seungri’s lap. He doesn’t answer.
“Please, hyung?”
“I told you to stop acting formal. Just call me Jiyong,” Jiyong sighs.
Jiyong doesn’t want to stay. This thing - this unspoken arrangement they have - isn’t the type of thing where he stays. It’s the type of thing where he pulls his clothes back on as soon as they finish, and sticks a cigarette between his teeth on the way out so there will be no goodbye kiss. It’s the type of thing where there are no backwards glances, no I’ll call you later, and definitely no staying.
“Jiyong, please stay.”
He’s already been here too long.
Seungri is pouting when Jiyong gets up, shaking the wrinkles out of his clothes as he gets dressed, but he doesn’t say anything else. He’ll figure it out eventually, Jiyong knows. He’ll get used to this, the fact that Jiyong doesn’t stay. Eventually, he’ll stop asking. They always do.
Seungri still tries to kiss him goodbye. He supposes there’s a learning curve. He lets Seungri do it, just this once, and puts the cigarette in his mouth after the door shuts behind him.
Seungri kisses him the next time, too. The learning curve must ascend a lot more slowly than Jiyong thought.
“Jiyong?” Seungri asks, during Jiyong’s fifth visit. He’s tracing patterns on Jiyong’s back with his finger, but the inefficiency of Seungri’s heater is the only reason he’s shivering. It’s the end of November, almost a month after the day they met. Somehow, the time passed without Jiyong noticing.
“Hm?”
“What’s your job like?”
“My job?” Jiyong rolls over to face him, and raises an eyebrow. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“I mean, I was just wondering.” Seungri’s blonde hair is tousled from when Jiyong pulled it, red marks sucked all over his neck by Jiyong’s lips. He look good like this, and that’s the only reason Jiyong doesn’t tell him to shut up. “About where you work, what your apartment looks like, what you do for fun. If you have friends, or just a bunch of cats. I mean, you know all those things about me, but I don’t know anything about you.”
“You don’t have to,” says Jiyong, and kisses him so he won’t say anything else.
But when he leaves, on a whim, he puts a copy of his key on Seungri’s coffee table. He places a note beside it: if you really want to know what my apartment looks like.
Runway Korea’s Editor-in-Chief Yang Hyunsuk could give his infamously vicious American counterpart, Miranda Priestly, a run for her money.
“I don’t like this,” he says, flipping through the bits and pieces of Jiyong’s inspiration collection and looking over his preliminary sketch. “Thorns are cliché. You used identical shoes two months ago. There’s too much green. That hat is old, not vintage. Everything on this paper is ugly. Start over.”
By now, Jiyong doesn’t even flinch as Hyunsuk tears up every last piece of his project and dumps them in a shredded pile on his desk. This is a normal part of the process; none of his initial ideas have ever survived unscathed. For that matter, neither have any of Hyunsuk’s staff. He rarely has anything nice to say to anyone. Once he told Jiyong that he hated the sound of his voice, and handed him a piece of tape to put over his mouth.
No one has ever seen the top of Hyunsuk’s head. Rumour has it that its existence is a myth. Today, it’s hidden inside a newsboy hat with a familiar tan, red and black striped pattern.
The devil wears Burberry.
“Those were awful,” Hyunsuk says, and gives Jiyong a look of deep displeasure. “Truly abysmal.”
Jiyong keeps his mouth shut. There’s tape holder within Hyunsuk’s reach, and he doesn’t want to risk it.
“Your main problem,” Hyunsuk says, indicating the heap of ripped paper, “Is that those are nothing. Your idea means nothing. No one will care about it, because you don’t.” He sifts through it until he finds the piece that contains the model’s head; Jiyong had left the face blank, and Hyunsuk shakes his head in disappointment. He slides it across the desk to Jiyong. “Draw someone you know. Draw someone you love. Draw someone you hate. Draw yourself. I don’t care. Just make this mean something. Because right now, it’s empty.”
Jiyong knows a lot of people. He doesn’t love anyone. He doesn’t hate anyone, either. But he does know a lot about himself. So he looks at the model’s blank face, and sifts around in the scraps for the rest of her body. He pieces it back together, holds it in place with tape, then picks up a pen.
From the door, Hyunsuk says, “By the way, your assistant Hongbin is incompetent. He’s wearing navy blue shoes. You should fire him. That’s all.”
By the time Jiyong looks up, Hyunsuk is already gone. It doesn’t really matter. Jiyong wouldn’t bother correcting him anyway.
Do you have plans tonight? Seungri’s text asks, three days after Jiyong’s last visit.
Yes, Jiyong replies. After a moment of hesitation he adds, But you can come with me.
The club he brings Seungri to is beneath a hotel in Gangnam, three levels of light and noise and buzz. People are packed in tightly; Girl’s Generation is here tonight, and the number of people willing to pay the exorbitant cover charge for the chance to get a glimpse of them is apparently pretty high. It’s a struggle to make his way through the crowd to the VIP area upstairs, where the rest of their party is waiting.
Jiyong is sweating by the time he opens the door to the private room Teddy reserved. “Shit,” he says, taking a deep breath now that he has space to. “We picked a bad night to come.”
The door shuts behind him. The rest of the group is already here. Teddy, Seunghyun, and Youngbae are interspersed between their guests: Goo Hara, the lead actress from KBS’s current top-rated drama; Jessica Jung, the head designer for a new brand called BLANC & ECLARE that’s really taking off; and a gorgeous model named Lee Chaerin who’s just been named the face of Chanel’s new Korean campaign. He’s impressed; Teddy’s turned out quite a crowd. He flashes the room a winning smile. “Hi.”
“Ah, Jiyong. You’re unfashionably late,” Seunghyun says. Jiyong places himself on the white leather sofa beside him anyway, reaching for the drink Youngbae slides to him across the table. “Weren’t you bringing a date?”
This is when Jiyong becomes aware that Seungri’s not with him anymore.
He reaches into his pocket, planning to text Seungri a quick Where are you??, but his hand fumbles between two phones. Right. He still has Seungri’s phone; he picked it up off the floor of the taxi on their way out of it. Seungri had knocked it off the seat beside him when Jiyong pulled him in for a heated kiss, murmuring against his mouth, you look so good. Seungri had let Jiyong dress him tonight, finally agreeing to wear some of the clothes Jiyong’s snobbish stylist sensibilities had been dying to put him in for weeks, and Jiyong dressed him exclusively in things he wanted to rip off of him later. Jiyong retracts his hand.
And he thinks, maybe he should go look for Seungri. But immediately, he knows that’s out of the question. It’s too crowded in this club; he’d never find Seungri amidst the wall-to-wall groups of girls in fifteen centimeter heels, and the boys hoping to bring them home. And it’s horrible, but a little part of him is thinking, Seungri doesn’t belong here. Not in a VIP room in the trendiest club in Gangnam, with stylists and actresses and designers and models. Seungri isn’t anyone. Not to them, and not to Jiyong. This isn’t a place for some no-name boy toy Jiyong fucks when he’s bored.
What was he thinking anyway, bringing Seungri? He must be losing his judgement.
“Jiyong,” Seunghyun says, snapping him back to the present. “Did you forget your date somewhere?”
“He couldn’t make it,” says Jiyong.
Seungri is naive.
It’s not like Jiyong didn’t know - had been pretending he didn’t know, maybe - but it’s painfully clear when he looks up at the sound of the door opening and Seungri is standing in the doorway, looking stricken.
The expression on his face is almost comical; an exaggerated mask, halfway to the frozen visages in a Greek tragedy. And it should sicken Jiyong that he can find any humour in this - dark humour, really - but it’s evident in his voice when he says, “Seungri? What are you doing here?”
Here is Jiyong’s bedroom. Dim lighting casts a sensual glow over the scene: Jiyong in bed under a pretty model he met at the release party for BLANC & ECLARE’s new handbag line, and by nine had lured out into the light snow of the early December night with one simple line: come home with me. Her cashmere coat is draped neatly over Jiyong’s desk chair, silk Chanel scarf tucked carefully into the sleeve. Jiyong’s suit is thrown haphazardly on the carpet beside it.
Seungri is choking back tears. This is so much more dramatic than Jiyong had expected.
The model gasps, throwing back the covers and sliding off the side of the bed, pulling the upper half of her cocktail dress back on as she goes. She snatches up her coat so hastily the scarf falls out of the sleeve, and pushes Seungri aside as she hurries out of the room too quickly to notice. The back of her dress is still unzipped, bra unclasped; this should sicken Jiyong too, the way he thinks that these are the details he would style her with if he had to create a scene called Betrayal.
The expression on her face was mortified panic. The expression on Seungri’s is devastated. The expression on Jiyong’s is blank.
Stunning performances from the whole cast.
“Really, Jiyong?” Seungri’s voice is almost a whisper. “Really?”
Seungri is so naive.
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
But Jiyong does. Boys like Seungri always think this means something. They think a few passionate encounters and occasional brief morning-afters are reason enough to get starry-eyed. Jiyong knows all about boys like Seungri. He used to be one a long time ago, several heartbreaks back. And he knows that the hearts of boys like Seungri are easy to break.
Poor naive Seungri. The tears he’s choking on are suffocating him. There’s a little tremble in his hands, an almost imperceptible quiver in his bottom lip, but Jiyong knows about boys like Seungri. He knows what they look like when their hearts break. Jiyong steadily holds his gaze.
“Well, if you’re here, you might as well stay.” Jiyong indicates the bed beside him. There’s an empty space now, after all, and Jiyong wasn’t planning on being alone tonight.
“I just came to get my wallet,” Seungri says. His voice is empty. All his emotions have migrated to his eyes, his mouth, his hands and his heart. “I left it here this morning. You didn’t answer my texts.”
Jiyong saw them, sort of. He didn’t read them. They popped up on his phone screen as he was checking the time, calculating whether he had been at the party long enough not to seem rude if he left with the model that was clearly giving him suggestive glances over her champagne glass. He dismissed the notifications, and didn’t think of them again.
“I didn’t get them,” he says. It sounds like as much of a lie as it is.
Seungri walks by Jiyong’s bed without giving him another look, reaching over the chair the model’s jacket had been laid over and picking his wallet up from the desk. “Good night, Jiyong,” he says, and shuts the bedroom door behind him. Jiyong expects the front door to slam, but it doesn’t.
This will be the last he sees of Seungri, he expects. He doesn’t mind. By now, it’s just part of the cycle. The natural order of things. No one stays for very long.
And he enjoyed Seungri; he really did. Seungri was pliable and amenable and satisfactorily acquiescent. But eventually, his time would have run out. From the start, his days had been numbered. Jiyong plays, not loves, and he wouldn’t let anyone stay for very long anyway.
This is the last he’ll see of Seungri, he expects. That’s how it always is.
He’s wrong.
He’s fine with Seungri sticking around, really. The only thing he likes more than playing is hurting.
He ends up calling his project “Poison Ivy”. The iron gates were all Hyunsuk would let him keep. The final version of the project is a woman in a tight white dress leaning up against those gates, a mansion with a manicured lawn and a fountain in the distance. Long vines of poison ivy are wrapped around her like a hug, twisting and twining up from the ground to hold her. But afterwards, Jiyong knows, pink would stain her skin in the places the leaves touch. The gentle embrace of the ivy would leave a painful impact that wouldn’t fade for a long time. It would be a shame, Jiyong thinks.
But for now, all people will see is the beauty. They won’t think about the aftermath until a little later, and then that will mar it for them.
Jiyong hopes it does. Poison Ivy has become one of his favourite projects. He did draw himself and someone he knows, after all.
It’s been almost two months now. Two months since the day Jiyong met Seungri, and one month since Seungri met the person Jiyong really is. Jiyong should’ve stopped finding himself in Seungri’s bed all the way back then, when they both had the perfect opportunity to go their separate ways, but Seungri is so naive. He should've run when he had the chance. Instead, three days afterwards, he asked Jiyong to come over. He kissed Jiyong on the lips, looking at him like he'd come to an understanding, and never brought it up again.
Things start to change after that.
It's almost imperceptible. It happens so gradually that Jiyong almost misses it. But little by little, something between them shifts.
Everything about Seungri is a mistake. None of this should be happening: Jiyong in Seungri’s lap, pinning him down on the sofa an hour before a meeting, sucking on his bottom lip with the full knowledge that he’ll be late. Or Jiyong kissing his way down Seungri’s neck, knowing with every one of Seungri’s soft sighs that he’ll be cancelling his plans tonight. Or Jiyong pressing his mouth to Seungri’s and licking at his tongue, Seungri’s hand pushed into his hair, thinking that no one who’s ever kissed him has done it with the same determination Seungri does.
None of these things should be happening. But they do, again and again.
When it becomes less like playing, Jiyong knows it's time for the game to end.
He starts setting deadlines. In a week, he'll leave. In a week, he'll pause halfway out the door and tell Seungri, I'm not coming back. And when he misses that deadline, he sets another. Then another. But every time, the deadlines pass. For someone whose life revolves around deadlines, Jiyong is having a disproportionate amount of trouble sticking to these ones.
Because it always happens like this: Seungri will smile, say something pointless that makes Jiyong laugh despite himself, then brush Jiyong’s hair back from his face and tell him to come over again tomorrow. And deep down, Jiyong will know Seungri’s just bought himself another week.
Seungri still kisses Jiyong on the nights he’s still awake when Jiyong leaves. Jiyong has begun to consider the possibility that the learning curve is actually a parabola. Because the longer Jiyong sticks around, the more Seungri seems to forget what he’s learnt about the impossible art of keeping his heart intact while loving Jiyong. And Jiyong starts to think there's a lot he's forgetting, too.
The morning of the editorial shoot, everything goes wrong.
Seunghyun’s assistant Mino collides with Daesung, the photographer, and the resulting fall sprains Daesung’s wrist. Youngbae, the hairstylist, shows up forty-five minutes late with an excuse that none of them really buy. Teddy appears at the last minute to veto Seunghyun’s makeup, making him wipe an hour’s worth of work off the model’s face and improvise a whole new look. But by far, the worst of the disasters is Jiyong.
Jiyong can barely keep his eyes open. His head is throbbing, and there’s a terrible feeling in his stomach. He misplaces the model’s shoes, leaving Mino to run around the entire building looking for them, and nearly burns the one-of-a-kind Valentino dress while trying to iron out the wrinkles that found their way into it on the flight from Milan. Hanbin appears almost instantly to remove the iron from Jiyong’s hands, and seamlessly takes over the task.
Jiyong drifts aimlessly around the set, getting the model’s hair caught in the fake poison ivy vines while attempting to wrap them around her. Seunghyun steps in disentangle her and finish draping them, while Jiyong downs painkillers with three cups of black coffee and tries to snap himself out of the way he’s nearly dead on his feet. All he can do is stand back and watch as everything moves around him, all the pieces of the puzzle clicking together, fitting into their places much more neatly without Jiyong’s interference. He feels lost. He watches Seunghyun fit into the puzzle in the space he should be, and with his space taken, he doesn't know where to go. Seunghyun steps out of the action for a moment to pull Jiyong aside when Jiyong tries to find himself a different place in the puzzle and instead drops a large box of antique necklaces, sending them scattering across the floor. The gold chains jangle horribly against the tile, and strings of pearls roll to a stop at Seunghyun's feet. “Jiyong, what the hell is going on? Are you even awake? You look tired.”
It’s the understatement of the century.
“I am,” says Jiyong.
The truth is he let himself into Seungri’s apartment at five in the morning, much more drunk than he should’ve been, crawling on top of Seungri in bed and waking him up by grinding their hips together. He pressed messy kisses to Seungri’s neck as Seungri groaned no, Jiyong, I need to sleep, I have work tomorrow, but Seungri relented in the end. He always does. Jiyong left directly for the shoot without any sleep, hangover rapidly creeping up on him, thinking this needs to stop. The problem is, time and time again, he's failed.
Jiyong knows what vices are. He has a lot of experience with them. He knows what it’s like when you can’t stay away from something: cigarettes, maybe, or caffeine, even though you know it’s destroying you.
It’s starting to feel like Seungri is a vice.
Jiyong hates Yang Hyunsuk’s office.
His hatred is justified. It’s rare that anyone is called in here for a positive reason. The walls of the office are covered in mirrors, reflecting back the unlucky visitor’s face from all their most unflattering angles, and giving the illusion of an even bigger space. The overall effect is terribly imposing. Standing in front of Hyunsuk’s desk, under his beady-eyed scrutiny, is a truly nerve-wracking experience.
Hyunsuk’s hat is leather today.
The devil wears Gucci.
“You are very, very lucky,” Hyunsuk is saying, tapping a silver pen on his desk. “Do you know how lucky you are?”
Jiyong doesn’t answer. He’s learnt by now that the vast majority of what Hyunsuk says is rhetorical; he would be dangerously irritated by a response.
“You’re lucky you’re so talented,” Hyunsuk says, still tapping his pen, “that I don’t want any other magazine to have you.”
Jiyong doesn’t thank him for the compliment. He’s learnt by now that Hyunsuk doesn’t mean it as one.
“Because if that weren’t the case,” Hyunsuk continues, “I would fire you on the spot.”
He drops his pen. It clatters on the desk. Jiyong lowers his eyes to the floor.
“Aren’t you ashamed?” A note of disdain enters Hyunsuk’s voice. “Aren’t you embarrassed about such an unprofessional display? Didn’t it bother you at all, seeing your assistant fixing your mistakes? Seeing your assistant doing your job better than you? If I were in your place, I wouldn’t be able to look him in the eye.”
At this moment, Jiyong wouldn’t be able to look anyone in the eye.
“And Seunghyun,” Hyunsuk continues. “Seunghyun had to take over your shoot. That wasn’t his job. You were meant to be in charge. He was meant to be the one listening to you. And to think, Teddy thought you were more capable than him.” Hyunsuk shakes his head. “He was wrong.”
Jiyong doesn’t say anything. He knows Hyunsuk doesn’t want him to. But even if he did, Jiyong has nothing to say.
“You’re lucky. You’re very, very lucky,” Hyunsuk says. “Don’t do this again, or your luck will run out.”
There’s a copy of the newly completed January magazine open on Hyunsuk’s desk. It’s open to a page that Jiyong knows all too well, burned into his mind after the five hours he stared at it, waiting for it to sink in. A woman leaning against wrought iron gates, caught in the embrace of long strands of green vines. A mansion with a fountain in the background. And beneath the woman, at the bottom of the page, six words:
Editorial: Poison Ivy
Stylist: Choi Seunghyun
Hyunsuk waves his hand at Jiyong to dismiss him. “That’s all.”
Jiyong leaves Hyunsuk’s office with his cheeks burning in humiliation. He slams his office door in Hanbin’s face when Hanbin tries to follow him in. At his desk, he lowers his head into his hands and takes a deep breath.
This has to stop, he thinks, for what must be the thousandth time. This thing with Seungri - whatever it is - has gone too far. Because Jiyong plays; he doesn’t love. And this thing is getting dangerously close to blurring that line. Seungri is getting dangerously close to blurring that line. So once and for all, this game needs to end.
It doesn’t.
Part II
big bang; g-dragon/seungri; 11 500 words; r
jiyong knows what vices are. he has a lot of experience with them. he knows what it’s like when you can’t stay away from something: cigarettes, maybe, or caffeine, even though you know it’s destroying you. it’s starting to feel like seungri is a vice. (the devil wears prada au)
% originally for kpop_ficmix; remix of beautiful mess by vvipforseungri
% [warnings] unhealthy/emotionally abusive relationship; alcohol abuse; possibly infidelity, depending on your view of the situations
% [notes]it became a the devil wears prada AU thanks to this scene from the film and the storm scene from the original fic
% for some reason, this made perfect sense to me at the time. however, you don't have to have seen/read TDWP to understand the fic
% the quoted song is the hills by the weeknd
% i've not written a big bang fic in literally years i'm so sorry
% i wrote this as a pinch-hit in literally 5 days. it's a product of sheer unedited panic.
% twitter // masterlist if you don't hate me by the time this is over
% dedicated to randomkyuu: my garbage brain twin and constant partner in crime
% now crossposted to ao3!
Jiyong gets used to what four AM looks like out Seungri’s window.
He gets used to the volume of the ebb and flow of traffic on the street below Seungri's apartment, the particular sequence of buildings visible in the distance, the pattern of the moonlight filtering through the open slats of the window blinds to highlight scattered patches of the blankets draped over them. He gets used to the warmth of Seungri’s body beside his, the sound of Seungri’s breathing always slightly out of time with his own, the feeling of Seungri’s soft hair brushing his neck when Seungri rolls over in his sleep and nuzzles his way closer to Jiyong. He gets used to watching the neon red of the bedside clock count up to the next hour, minute by minute, shifting restlessly between sheets that are always a bit too starchy for his comfort.
It’s nothing like four AM out Jiyong’s own window, where the sky is closer and the city lights are brighter through the floor-to-ceiling glass; where there’s no one to be out of sync with, no neon red numbers approaching the socially acceptable point for the escape he doesn’t have to make. But somehow, four AM out Jiyong’s window becomes more and more of a rare occurrence.
Jiyong gets used to what four AM looks like out Seungri’s window. And slowly, he gets used to Seungri.
This is when he realises everything about Seungri is a mistake.
Jiyong could’ve avoided Seungri so easily. Seungri is just a cute blonde barista in a small coffee shop Jiyong stops into on his way to work on a frigid November morning, smiling at Jiyong so brightly that Jiyong finally has to ask what the hell he could be so damn happy about at eight in the morning on a Thursday.
"It’s my last day here," Seungri replies, still smiling. "I just got a job at an advertising firm. Now I'll be doing graphic design."
And it would be so very, very simple for Jiyong not to bring Seungri into his life. For instance, he could choose not to smile back. He could give Seungri his order in a detached monotone, not with a little upwards intonation inviting further conversation. He could go back to flipping through the glossy Sonia Rykiel lookbook in his hands, distracting himself with distorted variations on argyle and garish shades of mauve, instead of leaning on the counter and watching the smiling blonde barista make his coffee. He could say something besides, "You should celebrate your new job. Go out or something." He could say nothing at all. Or he could do absolutely anything besides scribble his number on a napkin, slide it across the counter to Seungri and say, "If you do decide to go out tonight, let me know."
But Jiyong doesn’t avoid Seungri, because Jiyong loves playing.
The problem is, Jiyong plays to win.
It’s part of a larger pattern of behaviour. Jiyong spends his days creating small universes, all of his own design. He begins with a concept - just a few words tossed at him by an art director in a meeting - and develops a plane of existence based on it. He populates these with people, overlays them with fabrics and fills them in with colours. He sets up the scenes, draping and arranging and tugging and tousling until he’s made the perfect split-second frame for the camera to capture: his own personal world, trapped inside one shiny page.
From late fall. Edgy glamour. Feature Diane von Furstenberg, he creates a twisted forest with long-legged models as the trees, bent at unnatural angles and tangled in metallic scarves.
From spring ready-to-wear. Light and airy. Feature Oscar de la Renta, he creates an idyllic meadow and places a girl in it, her lace dress blending into the mist like a gradient until she appears to be vanishing into it thread by thread.
From resort. Black and white. Feature Marchesa, he creates a strikingly funeral-esque scene and somehow doesn’t get fired.
When Jiyong’s work is done, his one-page worlds are shut between the covers of Runway Korea, the country’s top fashion magazine, and placed onto shelves all over the globe. There, they wait to be opened and pull unsuspecting interlopers down the rabbit hole. Inevitably, they will end up on countless lists of the year’s best fashion editorials. Jiyong’s team will groan, not entirely joking, that this isn’t enough compensation for putting up with Jiyong’s insatiable perfectionism.
But it’s undeniable. Jiyong is very good what he does. Jiyong is an expert at making something sick out of something beautiful, and convincing the world to love it.
Jiyong doesn’t expect much from Seungri: an awkward greeting that ends when Seungri runs out of words, a few drinks downed as punctuation for awkwardly constructed sentences, a little friction between them on the dance floor and a quick fuck back at Seungri’s place. The bare minimum. He meets Seungri at the bar of the small club Seungri picked; he’s generally late to things like this.
“Hi,” Seungri says. Without his barista apron, he has a much more muscular body than Jiyong expected. His eyes are teasing, and they scan Jiyong just a little too slowly. Jiyong already wants to grab him by the hair and crush their mouths together. “Sorry I didn’t get you anything. I don’t know what you like to drink.”
“It doesn’t really matter,” says Jiyong, and pulls him to the dance floor.
Seungri is a good dancer. He moves his hips like he knows he’s capable of driving Jiyong insane, and he is. They only make it in the door of Seungri’s apartment before Jiyong pins him to the wall and kisses him until they’re both breathless and clutching at each other’s hair and clothes.
“You still smell like coffee,” Jiyong says, when Seungri pulls away to fumble with his belt. It’s a pointless observation, but Seungri laughs.
“Hopefully I won’t have that problem as a graphic designer. Pixels don’t smell like anything.”
Seungri’s smile is mesmerising.
Jiyong shoves Seungri onto the bed so hard the frame slams into the wall, pinning Seungri’s arms over his head and straddling him. Seungri gasps Jiyong’s name like his voice was made to say it, and his body reacts to Jiyong’s touch like it was programmed to respond. Jiyong rides him fast and rough, leaving him grasping at the sheets and gripping Jiyong’s hips, then slips out the door fifteen minutes after Seungri falls asleep.
Jiyong never plans to see Seungri again. He discovered several heartbreaks ago that he likes loving much less than playing. He dismisses the notification from Seungri’s thanks for last night text, and sets his phone back down amidst pencil sketches of thorny vines interspersed with printed pictures of ivy-coloured Louboutin pumps and scribbled notes reading maybe some iron gates. But when he sees its follow-up, How should I celebrate my first day of freedom? he finds his finger hesitating over the notification.
No one has to know, Jiyong thinks.
He leaves Seungri’s apartment at 3AM with Seungri’s cologne mixed in with his own and a song ringing in his ears: the hills have eyes, the hills have eyes.
The project winding its way around Jiyong’s desk in a long chain of pencil thorns, red-heeled shoes and messy scrawls is an editorial called “midsummer, slightly vintage, feature Valentino”. These are the words of Teddy, the art director. Jiyong doesn’t like that working title very much, but he hasn’t got anything better.
Just outside his office door, his dangerously stressed assistant Hanbin is in the middle of an hour-long circular debate with his phone, attempting to track down a hat Queen Elizabeth II wore back in 1980 that Jiyong has decided is critical to the success of the project. By now, Hanbin’s impending mental breakdown is familiar background noise.
It stops abruptly when Seunghyun saunters in, shutting the door behind him. “Jiyong. You finally succeeded in getting me demoted.”
Jiyong looks up from the wrought iron gates he’s sketching and raises an eyebrow at Seunghyun, who has for some reason seen fit to barge into his office and disrupt his questionable productivity. Seunghyun’s hair has been freshly dyed toothpaste teal, and it clashes aggressively with his maroon suit. As a fellow stylist, he should really know better. “I didn’t do anything. And doing makeup for one editorial is not a permanent demotion.”
“It’s for your editorial.”
“It wasn’t my fault.” Jiyong frowns. “Teddy said the last photoshoot you styled was, quote, “way too circus freak”. He tried to keep it from going in the magazine, but it had Hyuna in it, so Editor-in-Chief Yang made him put it back in.”
“They scorn that which they do not understand,” says Seunghyun, and trips over the Givenchy shoebox Jiyong sticks his foot around the desk to kick into his path. He pulls a chair up in front of Jiyong’s desk nonetheless. “So, what do you have?”
“Just this.” Jiyong shoves his mess of sketches, photos and notes across the desk. By now, the pencil thorns span three pages. Five different pictures of the same shoes are taped to them, along with Queen Elizabeth II and her hat. The scribbles fill every centimeter of the paper not already occupied with stream-of-consciousness observations.
“Hmm.” Seunghyun scans the pages, mimicking Jiyong’s earlier eyebrow raise. “This is completely incoherent. But I can still figure out what to do with it.”
“You’re the best. Sometimes,” Jiyong quickly amends. “Now get out of my office. And please, if you have to wear that suit with that hair, at least get a teal pocket square to tie things together.”
“Request denied.” Seunghyun kicks the shoebox back towards Jiyong as he gets up, heading for the door without moving the chair back to its original spot. “If you need me, I’ll be designing circus freak makeup to ruin your ideas.”
When Seunghyun opens the door, Hanbin is still on the phone. Judging by the quiver in his voice, he’s near tears. Jiyong gets the feeling they’re going to have to proceed without the hat.
“Stay here tonight.”
Seungri has an incredibly comfortable mattress, and the late Sunday morning sun coming in the window is shining just the right amount of warmth on Jiyong’s naked back. This is the only reason Jiyong is still here. It has nothing to do with Seungri’s fingers running through his hair, his head resting in Seungri’s lap. He doesn’t answer.
“Please, hyung?”
“I told you to stop acting formal. Just call me Jiyong,” Jiyong sighs.
Jiyong doesn’t want to stay. This thing - this unspoken arrangement they have - isn’t the type of thing where he stays. It’s the type of thing where he pulls his clothes back on as soon as they finish, and sticks a cigarette between his teeth on the way out so there will be no goodbye kiss. It’s the type of thing where there are no backwards glances, no I’ll call you later, and definitely no staying.
“Jiyong, please stay.”
He’s already been here too long.
Seungri is pouting when Jiyong gets up, shaking the wrinkles out of his clothes as he gets dressed, but he doesn’t say anything else. He’ll figure it out eventually, Jiyong knows. He’ll get used to this, the fact that Jiyong doesn’t stay. Eventually, he’ll stop asking. They always do.
Seungri still tries to kiss him goodbye. He supposes there’s a learning curve. He lets Seungri do it, just this once, and puts the cigarette in his mouth after the door shuts behind him.
Seungri kisses him the next time, too. The learning curve must ascend a lot more slowly than Jiyong thought.
“Jiyong?” Seungri asks, during Jiyong’s fifth visit. He’s tracing patterns on Jiyong’s back with his finger, but the inefficiency of Seungri’s heater is the only reason he’s shivering. It’s the end of November, almost a month after the day they met. Somehow, the time passed without Jiyong noticing.
“Hm?”
“What’s your job like?”
“My job?” Jiyong rolls over to face him, and raises an eyebrow. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“I mean, I was just wondering.” Seungri’s blonde hair is tousled from when Jiyong pulled it, red marks sucked all over his neck by Jiyong’s lips. He look good like this, and that’s the only reason Jiyong doesn’t tell him to shut up. “About where you work, what your apartment looks like, what you do for fun. If you have friends, or just a bunch of cats. I mean, you know all those things about me, but I don’t know anything about you.”
“You don’t have to,” says Jiyong, and kisses him so he won’t say anything else.
But when he leaves, on a whim, he puts a copy of his key on Seungri’s coffee table. He places a note beside it: if you really want to know what my apartment looks like.
Runway Korea’s Editor-in-Chief Yang Hyunsuk could give his infamously vicious American counterpart, Miranda Priestly, a run for her money.
“I don’t like this,” he says, flipping through the bits and pieces of Jiyong’s inspiration collection and looking over his preliminary sketch. “Thorns are cliché. You used identical shoes two months ago. There’s too much green. That hat is old, not vintage. Everything on this paper is ugly. Start over.”
By now, Jiyong doesn’t even flinch as Hyunsuk tears up every last piece of his project and dumps them in a shredded pile on his desk. This is a normal part of the process; none of his initial ideas have ever survived unscathed. For that matter, neither have any of Hyunsuk’s staff. He rarely has anything nice to say to anyone. Once he told Jiyong that he hated the sound of his voice, and handed him a piece of tape to put over his mouth.
No one has ever seen the top of Hyunsuk’s head. Rumour has it that its existence is a myth. Today, it’s hidden inside a newsboy hat with a familiar tan, red and black striped pattern.
The devil wears Burberry.
“Those were awful,” Hyunsuk says, and gives Jiyong a look of deep displeasure. “Truly abysmal.”
Jiyong keeps his mouth shut. There’s tape holder within Hyunsuk’s reach, and he doesn’t want to risk it.
“Your main problem,” Hyunsuk says, indicating the heap of ripped paper, “Is that those are nothing. Your idea means nothing. No one will care about it, because you don’t.” He sifts through it until he finds the piece that contains the model’s head; Jiyong had left the face blank, and Hyunsuk shakes his head in disappointment. He slides it across the desk to Jiyong. “Draw someone you know. Draw someone you love. Draw someone you hate. Draw yourself. I don’t care. Just make this mean something. Because right now, it’s empty.”
Jiyong knows a lot of people. He doesn’t love anyone. He doesn’t hate anyone, either. But he does know a lot about himself. So he looks at the model’s blank face, and sifts around in the scraps for the rest of her body. He pieces it back together, holds it in place with tape, then picks up a pen.
From the door, Hyunsuk says, “By the way, your assistant Hongbin is incompetent. He’s wearing navy blue shoes. You should fire him. That’s all.”
By the time Jiyong looks up, Hyunsuk is already gone. It doesn’t really matter. Jiyong wouldn’t bother correcting him anyway.
Do you have plans tonight? Seungri’s text asks, three days after Jiyong’s last visit.
Yes, Jiyong replies. After a moment of hesitation he adds, But you can come with me.
The club he brings Seungri to is beneath a hotel in Gangnam, three levels of light and noise and buzz. People are packed in tightly; Girl’s Generation is here tonight, and the number of people willing to pay the exorbitant cover charge for the chance to get a glimpse of them is apparently pretty high. It’s a struggle to make his way through the crowd to the VIP area upstairs, where the rest of their party is waiting.
Jiyong is sweating by the time he opens the door to the private room Teddy reserved. “Shit,” he says, taking a deep breath now that he has space to. “We picked a bad night to come.”
The door shuts behind him. The rest of the group is already here. Teddy, Seunghyun, and Youngbae are interspersed between their guests: Goo Hara, the lead actress from KBS’s current top-rated drama; Jessica Jung, the head designer for a new brand called BLANC & ECLARE that’s really taking off; and a gorgeous model named Lee Chaerin who’s just been named the face of Chanel’s new Korean campaign. He’s impressed; Teddy’s turned out quite a crowd. He flashes the room a winning smile. “Hi.”
“Ah, Jiyong. You’re unfashionably late,” Seunghyun says. Jiyong places himself on the white leather sofa beside him anyway, reaching for the drink Youngbae slides to him across the table. “Weren’t you bringing a date?”
This is when Jiyong becomes aware that Seungri’s not with him anymore.
He reaches into his pocket, planning to text Seungri a quick Where are you??, but his hand fumbles between two phones. Right. He still has Seungri’s phone; he picked it up off the floor of the taxi on their way out of it. Seungri had knocked it off the seat beside him when Jiyong pulled him in for a heated kiss, murmuring against his mouth, you look so good. Seungri had let Jiyong dress him tonight, finally agreeing to wear some of the clothes Jiyong’s snobbish stylist sensibilities had been dying to put him in for weeks, and Jiyong dressed him exclusively in things he wanted to rip off of him later. Jiyong retracts his hand.
And he thinks, maybe he should go look for Seungri. But immediately, he knows that’s out of the question. It’s too crowded in this club; he’d never find Seungri amidst the wall-to-wall groups of girls in fifteen centimeter heels, and the boys hoping to bring them home. And it’s horrible, but a little part of him is thinking, Seungri doesn’t belong here. Not in a VIP room in the trendiest club in Gangnam, with stylists and actresses and designers and models. Seungri isn’t anyone. Not to them, and not to Jiyong. This isn’t a place for some no-name boy toy Jiyong fucks when he’s bored.
What was he thinking anyway, bringing Seungri? He must be losing his judgement.
“Jiyong,” Seunghyun says, snapping him back to the present. “Did you forget your date somewhere?”
“He couldn’t make it,” says Jiyong.
Seungri is naive.
It’s not like Jiyong didn’t know - had been pretending he didn’t know, maybe - but it’s painfully clear when he looks up at the sound of the door opening and Seungri is standing in the doorway, looking stricken.
The expression on his face is almost comical; an exaggerated mask, halfway to the frozen visages in a Greek tragedy. And it should sicken Jiyong that he can find any humour in this - dark humour, really - but it’s evident in his voice when he says, “Seungri? What are you doing here?”
Here is Jiyong’s bedroom. Dim lighting casts a sensual glow over the scene: Jiyong in bed under a pretty model he met at the release party for BLANC & ECLARE’s new handbag line, and by nine had lured out into the light snow of the early December night with one simple line: come home with me. Her cashmere coat is draped neatly over Jiyong’s desk chair, silk Chanel scarf tucked carefully into the sleeve. Jiyong’s suit is thrown haphazardly on the carpet beside it.
Seungri is choking back tears. This is so much more dramatic than Jiyong had expected.
The model gasps, throwing back the covers and sliding off the side of the bed, pulling the upper half of her cocktail dress back on as she goes. She snatches up her coat so hastily the scarf falls out of the sleeve, and pushes Seungri aside as she hurries out of the room too quickly to notice. The back of her dress is still unzipped, bra unclasped; this should sicken Jiyong too, the way he thinks that these are the details he would style her with if he had to create a scene called Betrayal.
The expression on her face was mortified panic. The expression on Seungri’s is devastated. The expression on Jiyong’s is blank.
Stunning performances from the whole cast.
“Really, Jiyong?” Seungri’s voice is almost a whisper. “Really?”
Seungri is so naive.
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
But Jiyong does. Boys like Seungri always think this means something. They think a few passionate encounters and occasional brief morning-afters are reason enough to get starry-eyed. Jiyong knows all about boys like Seungri. He used to be one a long time ago, several heartbreaks back. And he knows that the hearts of boys like Seungri are easy to break.
Poor naive Seungri. The tears he’s choking on are suffocating him. There’s a little tremble in his hands, an almost imperceptible quiver in his bottom lip, but Jiyong knows about boys like Seungri. He knows what they look like when their hearts break. Jiyong steadily holds his gaze.
“Well, if you’re here, you might as well stay.” Jiyong indicates the bed beside him. There’s an empty space now, after all, and Jiyong wasn’t planning on being alone tonight.
“I just came to get my wallet,” Seungri says. His voice is empty. All his emotions have migrated to his eyes, his mouth, his hands and his heart. “I left it here this morning. You didn’t answer my texts.”
Jiyong saw them, sort of. He didn’t read them. They popped up on his phone screen as he was checking the time, calculating whether he had been at the party long enough not to seem rude if he left with the model that was clearly giving him suggestive glances over her champagne glass. He dismissed the notifications, and didn’t think of them again.
“I didn’t get them,” he says. It sounds like as much of a lie as it is.
Seungri walks by Jiyong’s bed without giving him another look, reaching over the chair the model’s jacket had been laid over and picking his wallet up from the desk. “Good night, Jiyong,” he says, and shuts the bedroom door behind him. Jiyong expects the front door to slam, but it doesn’t.
This will be the last he sees of Seungri, he expects. He doesn’t mind. By now, it’s just part of the cycle. The natural order of things. No one stays for very long.
And he enjoyed Seungri; he really did. Seungri was pliable and amenable and satisfactorily acquiescent. But eventually, his time would have run out. From the start, his days had been numbered. Jiyong plays, not loves, and he wouldn’t let anyone stay for very long anyway.
This is the last he’ll see of Seungri, he expects. That’s how it always is.
He’s wrong.
He’s fine with Seungri sticking around, really. The only thing he likes more than playing is hurting.
He ends up calling his project “Poison Ivy”. The iron gates were all Hyunsuk would let him keep. The final version of the project is a woman in a tight white dress leaning up against those gates, a mansion with a manicured lawn and a fountain in the distance. Long vines of poison ivy are wrapped around her like a hug, twisting and twining up from the ground to hold her. But afterwards, Jiyong knows, pink would stain her skin in the places the leaves touch. The gentle embrace of the ivy would leave a painful impact that wouldn’t fade for a long time. It would be a shame, Jiyong thinks.
But for now, all people will see is the beauty. They won’t think about the aftermath until a little later, and then that will mar it for them.
Jiyong hopes it does. Poison Ivy has become one of his favourite projects. He did draw himself and someone he knows, after all.
It’s been almost two months now. Two months since the day Jiyong met Seungri, and one month since Seungri met the person Jiyong really is. Jiyong should’ve stopped finding himself in Seungri’s bed all the way back then, when they both had the perfect opportunity to go their separate ways, but Seungri is so naive. He should've run when he had the chance. Instead, three days afterwards, he asked Jiyong to come over. He kissed Jiyong on the lips, looking at him like he'd come to an understanding, and never brought it up again.
Things start to change after that.
It's almost imperceptible. It happens so gradually that Jiyong almost misses it. But little by little, something between them shifts.
Everything about Seungri is a mistake. None of this should be happening: Jiyong in Seungri’s lap, pinning him down on the sofa an hour before a meeting, sucking on his bottom lip with the full knowledge that he’ll be late. Or Jiyong kissing his way down Seungri’s neck, knowing with every one of Seungri’s soft sighs that he’ll be cancelling his plans tonight. Or Jiyong pressing his mouth to Seungri’s and licking at his tongue, Seungri’s hand pushed into his hair, thinking that no one who’s ever kissed him has done it with the same determination Seungri does.
None of these things should be happening. But they do, again and again.
When it becomes less like playing, Jiyong knows it's time for the game to end.
He starts setting deadlines. In a week, he'll leave. In a week, he'll pause halfway out the door and tell Seungri, I'm not coming back. And when he misses that deadline, he sets another. Then another. But every time, the deadlines pass. For someone whose life revolves around deadlines, Jiyong is having a disproportionate amount of trouble sticking to these ones.
Because it always happens like this: Seungri will smile, say something pointless that makes Jiyong laugh despite himself, then brush Jiyong’s hair back from his face and tell him to come over again tomorrow. And deep down, Jiyong will know Seungri’s just bought himself another week.
Seungri still kisses Jiyong on the nights he’s still awake when Jiyong leaves. Jiyong has begun to consider the possibility that the learning curve is actually a parabola. Because the longer Jiyong sticks around, the more Seungri seems to forget what he’s learnt about the impossible art of keeping his heart intact while loving Jiyong. And Jiyong starts to think there's a lot he's forgetting, too.
The morning of the editorial shoot, everything goes wrong.
Seunghyun’s assistant Mino collides with Daesung, the photographer, and the resulting fall sprains Daesung’s wrist. Youngbae, the hairstylist, shows up forty-five minutes late with an excuse that none of them really buy. Teddy appears at the last minute to veto Seunghyun’s makeup, making him wipe an hour’s worth of work off the model’s face and improvise a whole new look. But by far, the worst of the disasters is Jiyong.
Jiyong can barely keep his eyes open. His head is throbbing, and there’s a terrible feeling in his stomach. He misplaces the model’s shoes, leaving Mino to run around the entire building looking for them, and nearly burns the one-of-a-kind Valentino dress while trying to iron out the wrinkles that found their way into it on the flight from Milan. Hanbin appears almost instantly to remove the iron from Jiyong’s hands, and seamlessly takes over the task.
Jiyong drifts aimlessly around the set, getting the model’s hair caught in the fake poison ivy vines while attempting to wrap them around her. Seunghyun steps in disentangle her and finish draping them, while Jiyong downs painkillers with three cups of black coffee and tries to snap himself out of the way he’s nearly dead on his feet. All he can do is stand back and watch as everything moves around him, all the pieces of the puzzle clicking together, fitting into their places much more neatly without Jiyong’s interference. He feels lost. He watches Seunghyun fit into the puzzle in the space he should be, and with his space taken, he doesn't know where to go. Seunghyun steps out of the action for a moment to pull Jiyong aside when Jiyong tries to find himself a different place in the puzzle and instead drops a large box of antique necklaces, sending them scattering across the floor. The gold chains jangle horribly against the tile, and strings of pearls roll to a stop at Seunghyun's feet. “Jiyong, what the hell is going on? Are you even awake? You look tired.”
It’s the understatement of the century.
“I am,” says Jiyong.
The truth is he let himself into Seungri’s apartment at five in the morning, much more drunk than he should’ve been, crawling on top of Seungri in bed and waking him up by grinding their hips together. He pressed messy kisses to Seungri’s neck as Seungri groaned no, Jiyong, I need to sleep, I have work tomorrow, but Seungri relented in the end. He always does. Jiyong left directly for the shoot without any sleep, hangover rapidly creeping up on him, thinking this needs to stop. The problem is, time and time again, he's failed.
Jiyong knows what vices are. He has a lot of experience with them. He knows what it’s like when you can’t stay away from something: cigarettes, maybe, or caffeine, even though you know it’s destroying you.
It’s starting to feel like Seungri is a vice.
Jiyong hates Yang Hyunsuk’s office.
His hatred is justified. It’s rare that anyone is called in here for a positive reason. The walls of the office are covered in mirrors, reflecting back the unlucky visitor’s face from all their most unflattering angles, and giving the illusion of an even bigger space. The overall effect is terribly imposing. Standing in front of Hyunsuk’s desk, under his beady-eyed scrutiny, is a truly nerve-wracking experience.
Hyunsuk’s hat is leather today.
The devil wears Gucci.
“You are very, very lucky,” Hyunsuk is saying, tapping a silver pen on his desk. “Do you know how lucky you are?”
Jiyong doesn’t answer. He’s learnt by now that the vast majority of what Hyunsuk says is rhetorical; he would be dangerously irritated by a response.
“You’re lucky you’re so talented,” Hyunsuk says, still tapping his pen, “that I don’t want any other magazine to have you.”
Jiyong doesn’t thank him for the compliment. He’s learnt by now that Hyunsuk doesn’t mean it as one.
“Because if that weren’t the case,” Hyunsuk continues, “I would fire you on the spot.”
He drops his pen. It clatters on the desk. Jiyong lowers his eyes to the floor.
“Aren’t you ashamed?” A note of disdain enters Hyunsuk’s voice. “Aren’t you embarrassed about such an unprofessional display? Didn’t it bother you at all, seeing your assistant fixing your mistakes? Seeing your assistant doing your job better than you? If I were in your place, I wouldn’t be able to look him in the eye.”
At this moment, Jiyong wouldn’t be able to look anyone in the eye.
“And Seunghyun,” Hyunsuk continues. “Seunghyun had to take over your shoot. That wasn’t his job. You were meant to be in charge. He was meant to be the one listening to you. And to think, Teddy thought you were more capable than him.” Hyunsuk shakes his head. “He was wrong.”
Jiyong doesn’t say anything. He knows Hyunsuk doesn’t want him to. But even if he did, Jiyong has nothing to say.
“You’re lucky. You’re very, very lucky,” Hyunsuk says. “Don’t do this again, or your luck will run out.”
There’s a copy of the newly completed January magazine open on Hyunsuk’s desk. It’s open to a page that Jiyong knows all too well, burned into his mind after the five hours he stared at it, waiting for it to sink in. A woman leaning against wrought iron gates, caught in the embrace of long strands of green vines. A mansion with a fountain in the background. And beneath the woman, at the bottom of the page, six words:
Editorial: Poison Ivy
Stylist: Choi Seunghyun
Hyunsuk waves his hand at Jiyong to dismiss him. “That’s all.”
Jiyong leaves Hyunsuk’s office with his cheeks burning in humiliation. He slams his office door in Hanbin’s face when Hanbin tries to follow him in. At his desk, he lowers his head into his hands and takes a deep breath.
This has to stop, he thinks, for what must be the thousandth time. This thing with Seungri - whatever it is - has gone too far. Because Jiyong plays; he doesn’t love. And this thing is getting dangerously close to blurring that line. Seungri is getting dangerously close to blurring that line. So once and for all, this game needs to end.
It doesn’t.
Part II