Crevices: Refrain of a Soul [1/3]
Title: Crevices: Refrain of a Soul
Author: Anonymous until 1/30/14
For: saphirediva
Pairing: Baekhyun/Baekhyun
Word Count: 20,340
Summary: He finds him in between the folds of reality.
Warnings: character death
Rating: PG-13
One
The phone rings in the middle of a summer evening sticky with heat, and Baekhyun hears it all the way from his work table. Pinned to his cork board are swatches of fabric and color charts, and his eyes glance from his sewing machine to salmon pink silk, before pushing back his chair. He glares at the aircon sputtering out rare bursts of cold air before kicking open the door.
His mother answers the call first.
Baekhyun stares at the thin, sharp lines of her form bent against the wall with the headset pressed against the side of her face. A sigh escapes his lips. He lingers in the hallway with the weight of not wanting to agonize over another blasted seam and the zipper that keeps coming apart. His mother turns around and sees him, and worry makes her face resemble a crumpled piece of paper, and her slim hand beckons him to come forward. Call your father, she mouths.
She’s upset -- he can tell it from the way her eyes are a bit too bright and her lips are molded into a frown pushed back by sheer will. He does as she says and leaves his parents there in the hallway, footsteps fading back to his own room.
He wonders what’s wrong and what the call is for, but he has a dress to make. Baekhyun falls right back into the rhythm of needle and thread, and thoughts about the call flicker into non-existence, and the swatches glimmer under the fluorescent lights.
÷
He wakes up in the back of the car with his limbs still in pajamas and his hair a nest of thread and maybe safety pins. His older brother is draped over a backpack and a suitcase, and he seems to be in no hurry to yawn awake anytime soon. Baekhyun scratches his neck and shifts his joints into a more comfortable seating position. Scenery darts past. Confusion slips through his fingers.
“Where are we going?” he croaks out, voice coming out rusty. He winces and tries to untangle the spool of red cotton-wool blend from his hair.
“Your grandmother’s house,” his father says. He’s up there in the driver’s seat, hands on the wheel and feet on the pedals, and he glances at Baekhyun through the rearview mirror. “She’s ill, so we’re going to help take care of her.”
Baekhyun presses his cheek against the window, ignoring the way his head thumps a bit on the tempered glass every time the car hits a bump in the road. All he remembers about his grandmother are wisps of vanilla-scented smoke rising from candles and soft, wrinkled skin and piping-hot cookies on days when he’s been a good boy. The last time he’d visited her feels almost like a century ago, though in actuality it’s only been a little over five years. Still he has glimpses of the sea in his memories -- snapshots of an old, elegant manor resting on a hill, cascading downwards to wrought iron gates and sand and miles of water; of the breeze tasting salty on his tongue, and the sun painting his skin a delicate shade of red.
He remembers his grandmother’s steady steps and the way her throaty voice had spun the very air she breathed into songs more beautiful than anything Baekhyun had ever heard. She’d taught him every single note rising and falling on lines of musical staff, tapping rhythm on the back of his hand and taught him never to need a metronome, until fugues and symphonies and concertos were burned into the backs of his eyelids. In return, he’d chosen to pursue a degree in fashion.
Sometimes, he finds himself spread out on the bed with melodies overflowing in his mind. Baekhyun likes music, has grown up with it, has inhaled it every second of his life. But he’d fallen in love with something else somewhere along the way, and there are times when he finds himself wondering how different things would have been.
He shakes off the thoughts and looks down at his needle-nicked hands. Perhaps he still has some lingering affection left for emotions buried in music, but for now his consciousness comes alive with color wheels and expert stitching.
Up front, his mother reaches out to turn on the radio. Baekhyun lets his eyes flutter shut.
÷
They arrive at his grandmother’s manor a little past eight in the morning, and as Baekhyun stumbles out of the car with eyes half-blurred by sleep, he’s hit by the familiar scent of brine. His brother runs into him and Baekhyun only just maintains his balance.
“Help us get the suitcases out,” his mother says, walking past the two of them with several boxes in her arms. Baekhyun blinks at her, then at his brother’s sleepy form, then at the luggage that his father’s unloading from the trunk.
He frowns. “How long are we staying here? We brought a lot of things.”
“I don’t know,” his mother says. She purses her lips and worry runs down the curves of her face. “We’re staying until your grandmother gets better.”
Baekhyun opens his mouth then closes it. There’s something in his mind, something that needs to be said, something that’s very much like But what if she doesn’t? He catches himself just in time and turns to help his father. His brother’s a dead weight by now, clutching onto the door handle for support, eyes foggy with the haze of dreams.
The caretaker rushes down to help them the moment they start straggling toward the manor’s patio. Baekhyun thinks he should be self-conscious about walking around in pajamas with bunnies on them, especially since he’s majoring in fashion, but right now he’s just a robot. He wants to bring in all of their belongings and maybe plop down on a soft mattress with nice springs so he can bounce off of it, and he rolls in the suitcases with a sigh.
He stands in the living room as everyone else rushes about: His father’s still bringing in more things, his mother’s rushed upstairs to his grandmother’s bedroom, the caretaker’s struggling under the weight of a vase which Baekhyun thinks has no business being here, and his brother’s slumped over the couch with his backpack slipping down to the floor. It feels a little emptier than usual, a little sadder -- a little like the sun hasn’t peeled back the curtains like it used to and filled the place with warmth. It’s far, far different from the images in Baekhyun’s head.
He almost doesn’t register the house help now spilling into the living room, fussing around with the suitcases and taking them to different rooms. Baekhyun sees one of them prop his brother up in a more comfortable position, tucking a pillow in his arms.
“Where’s grandmother?” he asks, and the question is directed to his father but it’s one of the maids who answers.
“In the master bedroom, like always,” she says.
Baekhyun looks at his father, who nods, and then he’s climbing up the stairs. Of course his grandmother’s in the master bedroom, surrounded by shelves upon shelves of musical sheets, violins gleaming behind display cases. The master bedroom, where portraits of her and her husband hang on the right side, facing the windows so that We can always see the light, Baekhyun.
He pushes open the door.
It’s silent, more silent than Baekhyun’s ever known it to be. His grandmother once told him that there was music in silence, a beat existing beneath the quiet surroundings, a melody threaded through the the things that are always left unsaid. She’d told him that it was okay to let words die once in a while, whenever he’d rushed through rests and pauses faster than they were supposed to be played.
Five years later, the absence of sound still unsettles him.
His mother’s pulled up a chair and is sitting by the bedside, her expression unreadable and her hands folded on her lap.
“Did they tell you what the problem was?” Baekhyun asks, coming over to stand beside her.
She shakes her head. “It’s just...age,” she says. “She’s getting old. Her body’s not the same anymore.” She reaches out and rests her hand on his grandmother’s arm. “You should go unpack your things.”
Baekhyun hesitates, looking down at his grandmother. There is white braided into her once-lustrous black hair. Her face is creased with paper-thin frowns, fine wrinkles and slashes of time. Her chest rises and falls. Baekhyun remembers her singing him a lullaby whenever he’d had difficulty sleeping as a child, and right now he wants to play that for her.
“Are you sure?”
His mother nods. “Yes, I’m sure. Go on, now. She’ll be awake later, I’m sure, and you’ll get to talk to her.”
He lingers for one more second, one more breath. And then he’s exiting the room and going back down the stairs, every footfall echoing empty staccato in such a huge manor. Baekbeom is still passed out on the couch, Baekhyun’s father is going through their luggage, and the househelp are fluttering about.
“Do you need help with anything?” Baekhyun asks, crouching next to a red suitcase.
“It’s fine,” his father says. “You can go up if you want to, though. Your room is the third one on the left, the one where you used to sleep whenever we visited. Do you remember?”
Images of blue-gray curtains and a boarded-up fireplace flash in muted frame-by-frames in Baekhyun’s mind. He thinks of beds with maroon comforters that pull you in deeper, of a piano shrouded in crochet lace and dust and neglect, of locked cabinets and thick carpets. “Yeah, I do.”
He picks up his bags and shoos away any of the housemaids coming to help him. Baekhyun wanders through the corridors of the second floor, and as he passes by each closed door, it’s as if there is a sunlit-drenched version of himself running past. He used to play here, amazed by the sheer size of everything and peeking inside rooms.
He stops in front of his assigned bedroom.
It’s been years since he’s last been here, and nostalgia creeps its way in the way it does when Baekhyun lets all his guards fall, broken, to the ground. He rests his palm on the knob for a while, trying to replicate the feeling of being eight years old and unable to reach the knob without tiptoeing. Then he’s pushing the door open, and the scent of old things hits him, and Baekhyun stands in the doorway. Everything looks the same, and yet everything seems to have changed. He places his bags on a spot near the desk and then he’s flopping, back first, on the bed.
He rolls over and turns his head to the side, where the piano stands.
Even throughout the entire time that his grandmother had taught him how to play, Baekhyun had never been allowed to use this particular instrument. It had always been locked up and tucked beneath folds of cloth. He used to think it was some kind of magic piano, that maybe it was broken, and it was better that his grandmother trained him to play herpiano instead.
Now he thinks it’s just another object aging with all the weight of tunes that have never been sung. He brings his hands up and stares at them, at the maroon bleeding through the spaces in his fingers from the bed’s canopy. Baekhyun sighs.
He wonders if, after all this time, he can still read music sheets and understand what they mean in a language that’s never needed words.
It’s different from fashion. It’s different, because though the medium of sound comes in the form of an instrument and is tangible, music itself isn’t. It is not as concrete as back panelings and hidden seams, as substantial as silk and linen and cotton and wool. Baekhyun can go up and down the scales and still not know why octaves come out the way they do, but he can understand fabric. He can interpret every twist and turn of expert stitching and come away burdened by new techniques.
Maybe it had been less about wanting to veer from tradition, from what he’d grown up with. Maybe it had been more about the comfort of knowing what exactly you are working with, that if you did things a certain way, there would be consistency.
He sighs and grabs the nearest pillow, and decides to go to sleep in order to stop the thoughts waging a war in his head.
÷
Darkness flakes into blacks and grays and dark blues when he so much as breathes in the room. He touches the desk and his fingers look like they are covered in soot, the tint coming apart when he rubs his palms together. Every move, he finds out, is delayed by a millisecond. He’s not sure if his feet are on the ground anymore. He’s not sure if they should even be.
Sunlight dances through the spaces between the curtains, settling on patches of wall and ceiling and floor in bursts of white. There are too many shadows it cannot drive away. Baekhyun is head under in oblivion, hidden from sight and tucked away in a corner. He raises a hand and places it on his chest, waiting for the heartbeat that thumps a tad slower than it normally does. He wonders if this is a nightmare, the kind that snaps you up and swallows you whole, until you are unable to escape.
Something shifts in the periphery of his vision, breaking away from the blank space that the room has become. At first it is hard to pin down, difficult to name and assign a form to -- it is a blend of light and darkness, bridging the gap between transparency and opacity. The shape wavers, changes, movements sluggish and uncertain. It stumbles to the window, unraveling and then gathering itself close.
Baekhyun blinks, and it becomes a human figure. A charcoal sketch, wobbling just the tiniest bit as it leans its head with indecipherable features against the glass. Its hands tap out a nameless, silent beat that tiptoes toward Baekhyun and then brushes past him.
It’s not even cold, but he shivers.
He takes a step forward, disturbing the shadows wrapping themselves around his ankles. Somewhere in the distance, Baekhyun can hear a faint melody playing, but it sounds too far away for him to fully grasp it. He lifts his hand, points it toward the figure -- his lips part and his breaths come quick -- his feet take five, six more steps forward --
Light pierces the silhouette, cutting it up into bits and pieces that tumble back to the shadows.
÷
“Baekhyun?”
He jolts awake at his name being called, blinking up at the slope of his brother’s chin and the threadbare eyelashes fluttering down at him. Fatigue is etched into Baekbeom’s features, a chicken scrawl mess that leaves him only just coherent enough to fight back a yawn.
“What is it?” he asks, hand running through his hair and tension gathering in his shoulders. His watch tells him it’s 5 pm now, and the familiar orange hues of sunset are turning the red brocade of the drapings into flames.
“We need to come down,” his brother says. “It’s dinner time.” Without looking back to see if his younger brother is following, Baekbeom pivots on his foot and turns, walking straight out of the bedroom. Baekhyun is left to press his forehead against his knees, a strange feeling working its way up his toes. He dreamed of something, he knows -- something vivid and startling and confusing. Trying to hold on to it is fruitless, aimless, and he’s grasping for the tattered edges of a thing that he won’t ever be able to catch.
He groans and tumbles out of bed. He’s still in his sleep pajamas, sweat salty on his skin, but he decides to shower after dinner. His parents don’t like it when he’s late to the table. It’s rude to make food wait, he can almost hear his mother say.
They settle at the table, all four of them, and Baekhyun is too hesitant to ask after his grandmother. Baekbeom is drifting off even though he’s sitting right across Baekhyun, head tilting just the tiniest bit to the right, eyes unfocused. His father sips his coffee. Beside Baekhyun, his mother is a shade paler and her skin is crowded with lines of worry, her shaking knuckles betraying her fatigue. Baekhyun looks down as he swallows his soup.
Baekbeom leans back in his chair and asks, “How long are we staying here?” A yawn flits off from his mouth.
“Three months, maybe four,” his mother says. “We’ll wait until your grandmother gets better.”
Or gets worse, Baekhyun tacks on. His mother doesn’t say it but the implication hovers over them. The rice tastes a lot like cardboard now; the juice isn’t enough to sweeten the bitterness of the bile rising in Baekhyun’s throat. He forces them down anyway.
When dinner is over, the house help swoop in before Baekhyun’s father can so much as tell his sons to clear the table. They stand there for a few minutes, not quite sure what to do, and then their gazes intersect. Baekbeom stumbles off to the couch and slumps down the cushions, body bent in awkward angles. Baekhyun follows his mother up to his grandmother’s room, while his father totters off to turn on the television.
His grandmother is sitting up on her bed when they enter, vein-riddled hands gripping the comforter. Her hair looks as if it’s just been brushed, and though she seems to drown in the size of her bed, her brown eyes are clear and determined. Baekhyun lingers by the doorway while his mother goes to sit by the bedside, murmurs of Mother, you’re awake trailing after her.
“Come closer, Baekhyunnie,” his grandmother says. Baekhyun hesitates, watches the soft downturn of her lips, takes in the brief sparks catching in her eyes. Her eyebrows knit together and she pats a spot beside her, more insistent this time. “Come here.”
His mother looks back at him and nods. Baekhyun walks toward them and sits on the edge of the bed, near his grandmother’s feet. She glances at him then at the spot she’d indicated before. She doesn’t press it, though.
“How are you?” she rasps out, and Baekhyun’s not sure if he’s the one she’s asking. Her gaze seems fixated on a point between her grandson and her daughter.
“Fine, mother,” Baekhyun’s mother says. She reaches out to take her mother’s hand. “We’re all doing really well. But what about you? The doctor said --”
“I’m not going to die,” Baekhyun’s grandmother interrupts. “Not yet, Sojin, so you can stop looking at me like you are about to lose me.”
His mother flinches and looks away. Baekhyun is snared in his grandmother’s vision now, the only focus point left between the two of them, and for some reason he’s nervous. There is a strange intensity building in the room and it’s coiled around his neck, growing tighter and tighter even though he’s trying to keep his breathing steady.
“What about you, young man?” his grandmother asks. “How are your studies going?”
“I’ve been well, grandmother,” he says. His voice is rough sandpaper caressing wood. “I’m graduating in a couple of years, and I’ve been invited to showcase my designs in a fashion show that the university is holding.”
His grandmother squints at him. “And what about music? The piano?”
“I - I don’t play the piano anymore, grandmother,” Baekhyun stutters. The planes of his grandmother’s face seem harsher, her cheekbones jutting out bone-white against her skin. She looks as if she’s barely been put together, loose ends fraying and ready to break at any moment.
But her spine is stiff and her head held high, and there is something like defiance in the way her lips are set. “Why not?” she asks.
Baekhyun’s mother steps in then, tone gentle as she says, “Mother, Baekhyun is pursuing a different field now. He has no time left to devote to music.”
His grandmother snorts. “Nonsense. There is always time for music! In fact, Sojin, there is always time for everything as long as you don’t squander the minutes you have been given. Baekhyunnie, that is no excuse. Playing the piano is a skill you might need in the future, and even if it doesn’t have anything to do with fashion, it’s still something worth cultivating. Or are you telling me that all those years I’ve spent drilling you are all just going to waste?”
“Of course not, grandmother,” he says, crumpling beneath her stare. “I’ll keep practicing.”
“Good.” All the energy comes out of her then and she slumps in her pillows, face looking more tired than ever. Her skin sags as if it cannot bear to carry her bones and clothe them. “I’d like to have passed on something before I leave this world.”
Baekhyun bites his lip. He can see his mother struggling, trying to come up with something to say, but in the end air just gushes out of her mouth and she rubs her mother’s arm in a soothing manner. Baekhyun thinks of how long he’s left his music sheets to rot in his closet. He’s not certain that he can still read notes and play as well as he used to.
When his grandmother speaks again, she’s looking at the instruments on her walls. “So much talent,” she whispers. “So much talent in this blood. I hope you realize that, young man. It’s nice that you’re trying something new, but don’t forget the music. You will find it closer to kin than most other people do.” She pins him with a look then, one that Baekhyun cannot find it in himself to describe. “Do you understand?”
“I understand,” he murmurs.
She nods. “Very well. I need to speak to your mother for a while now, so maybe you can start fulfilling your promise and practice with the piano in your room, yes?”
Baekhyun stands up and gives a noncommittal shake of his head, crossing the line between yes and no. He’ll let his grandmother decide for herself what it means.
With that, he leaves the room, but not before hearing his grandmother ask: “How much time do I have left?”
÷
He is standing backstage, soaked in nerves from head to toe. Static is embedded into the pads of his fingers, crackling when he so much as touches a nearby wall, and his wrists tingle. It’s odd how the place is so quiet -- something about the lack of sound strikes a wrong chord within him. It feels incomplete.
He walks out to the stage, a vast wooden platform covered from sight by heavy velvet curtains. Dust settles on everything and tickles his nose. He can build a one-storey house in here, or hold a ball, or raise an entire community of people. There is a feeling trapped beneath his skin, one of combined anxiety and excitement. He flops to the ground and lies down.
Up above, a hundred different kinds of lights shine down on him, coating him in lurid hues of blue and green and red. Multicolored spots dance in his vision. Expectation thrums throughout the stage, as if it is watching and waiting for what he will do next.
When he sits up again, the entire place dims until a single spotlight is trained on the middle. He watches the curtains rise, watches the empty chairs judging him even in the gloom. He turns back around, and there is a piano caught in the circle of orange-white, its surface gleaming. He tries to walk toward it but it feels like he is being held back, bolted down to his spot by something greater than he can comprehend.
Black drips from the surrounding darkness, blobs of it all stacked up until the form becomes liquid, taking on a human shape. He thinks that there must be a vague suggestion of a face but it’s out of focus, pixelating in low quality color blocks and fading out of his consciousness. It approaches the piano with a purposeful stride and settles on the bench, feet pressing down the pedals and fingers splayed on the keys.
The melody is stronger this time, more noticeable but still indistinguishable. It’s as if it’s coming toward him, closer and closer until the distance has bowed out of the way and left nothing between them, and he cannot make it out. He hears an F sharp, a minor E maybe. Vague chords rise out of air. He watches as the figure continues playing, its form a jelly-like substance rippling with every movement.
There is something familiar about the figure, taunting him and asking him how he hasn’t figured out its secrets yet. It rankles, and he’s left to deal with questions that tumble against his skull, questions he cannot answer. Questions that roll in rivers of thought, tossed from wave to wave and coming out smooth, drifting back to shore.
The curtains drop down.
÷
Baekhyun goes down to the beach two nights after he wrestles with his mannequins and tries to figure out why the diagonal seams aren’t diagonal. His visits to his grandmother have dwindled to naked seconds spent lingering just outside the room. He doesn’t particularly want to tell his grandmother that the piano remains covered, and Baekhyun is too caught up in sewing clothes, and anyway there is nothing to play. There are probably music sheets here but he doesn’t know where they are, so he thinks there is no point at all in even trying.
It takes a bit of walking to get to the beach, but Baekhyun slathers sunscreen on his nape and arms and whistles the entire way. He tries not to think of the dreams that have been brewing in the deepest corners of his mind, taking root in the way they always do, and slipping out of reach before Baekhyun can even begin to recall them. It’s frustrating and he’s spent sunrises in bed with his eyes wide open, and he just wants to know what they mean. To at least have pieces of them that he can keep, so he can somehow understand.
The water is freezing when he dips his feet into it, careful not to scratch his heels on jagged rocks. He debates swimming but without a companion, Baekhyun doesn’t want to risk it. Instead he walks like that, pant legs rolled up to his thighs, looking for seashells down the entire length of the beach. It’s lonely here, and quiet. His grandmother’s property is removed from the rest of the community.
He thinks of the mint green blazer now thrown on the bed, its zipper just the slightest bit crooked. He thinks of the peplum blouse with too big ruffles and an awkward fit. He thinks and thinks, and Baekhyun finds that he doesn’t want to think anymore. He wants to run. His project’s less of a chance to prove himself, and more of a tumor-inducing headache threatening to take his life away. It’s hard, correcting the little slip-ups -- the slant, the haphazard patterns, the incorrect kind of fabric.
The breeze cards through his hair and salt spray smacks him in the face, but Baekhyun just sinks deeper into the water. It’s a little warmer now, the heat burrowing into the ocean, and Baekhyun basks there for a few more minutes. He wonders if his grandmother is having a conversation with his parents again. Despite the iron glinting in the old woman’s eyes, they can all feel the end
crawling toward them.
Yesterday, he’d overheard them talking about the appraisal of the estate’s value and the art pieces. Baekhyun hadn’t stayed to find out specific details, but he knew the beginning of goodbye, knew the necessary preparations that one made before leaving. He knew, and he’d gone to his room and stared at the covered piano for hours.
He looks up at the mansion, standing tall and ageless against the horizon, and he sighs. It’s been five years. He shouldn’t be this attached to the place, or unsure about the decisions he’s made. It’s not as if things are meant to last forever.
Baekhyun knows that, and as he wraps the towel around himself, he wonders why he still feels like he’s standing on rocky ground.
÷
Flames lick the air around him in bright shades of red and orange, dancing on wicks and wax pooling in glass candle holders. The windows are all thrown open, and moonlight marks its spot on the wooden floor, curtains rustling with every breath.
There are sheets of lined paper scattered on the desk, hundreds of them. Musical notes are scribbled all over the staff, black ink smudging somewhere along the way, and several have been crossed out. He picks one up, studies the unraveling of a symphony -- he knows it’s supposed to make sense but it doesn’t, not to him, and he can only just pick out the do, the re, the mi.
Just like before, black flakes off the darkness, and bits and pieces of it slot against each other to create a makeshift human form. It adjusts proportions, carves anatomy out of shadows. Against the flames, a figure with its head bent and hands fisted settles over the scattered papers. He thinks he can see the outline of a pen, slashing frustration across pages and pages of symbols, creating and destroying and starting over again.
It doesn’t make much sense to him. But then he thinks of his own failed designs and the difficulty of execution, of nights spent looking for perfection and only coming up with something that’s not even close. The ability to create isn’t for the sane. It isn’t for those with simple aspirations, who can walk away and not look back.
He’s never tried to compose songs, and maybe he can’t quite sympathize with the figure, but it’s a waste. It’s a waste, these bits and pieces of charred plant pulp falling to the ground. Paper confetti, all of them -- ripped up and thrown and reduced to ashes. The figure keeps writing. Its motions are furious now. There is a certain kind of desperation in the way it writes faster and faster and faster.
When the flames burn brighter, they become fixed twin points of passion, growing and growing until there is nothing else to see.
÷
He stares at the mannequins propped on his desk, all prepped up with nowhere to go. In the back of his mind, there’s a little nudge telling him he should be happy that his prototypes are done and look as similar to his drawings as they will ever be. But Baekhyun’s too fixated on the wooden surface and remembering how, in last night’s dream, it had succumbed beneath the mess of papers and pens and ink.
It’s hard, putting the dreams in corners where Baekhyun can avoid them. There is something unsettling about them and the way they seem to be forming a pattern, changing every time and yet somehow linked to the last, and he almost drowns in their clamor to be remembered. They tug at him in the moments when there is nothing to occupy him. He grows wary of empty spaces in the house, now. Where shadows lurk, he sees flashes of the figure forming, and a chill trails up his spine.
It reminds him of the penny papers his classmates used to buy from the vendor in front of the middle school, newsprint staining their fingers gray when they sat on desks and read the stories out loud. Horror, his friend Jongdae would say, the cat-like corners of his lips turned up. Jongdae would invade Baekhyun’s space and swing his legs in glee while brandishing the paper in front of him. He’d pry off the hands Baekhyun covered his ears with and, with a dramatic exhale, begin to act out the tale of a man seeing a ghost in the bathroom. It was strange, the sensationalism of these stories. Ladies in white appearing in mirrors, and the sound of chains being dragged down an empty hallway, and spirits that came to wreck lives or exact vengeance -- all of these used to scare Baekhyun witless. Jongdae knew, and so Jongdae would pick the worst of them all.
Baekhyun’s never believed, tries not to believe, in the supernatural. In high school he’d convinced himself that the stories Jongdae told him were created for the cheap thrill, the momentary burst of adrenaline. Still, he shrouds himself in blankets at night and wonders if there is any merit to them at all, his suspicions only heightened ever since the dreams began.
The house is old, after all. It’s said hello and goodbye to lives more ancient than his grandparents’, dating back centuries. Baekhyun’s reminded of it whenever he walks into the library and gets hit, not by the clouds of dust, but by the knowledge the place has accumulated. He’s seen medieval texts in the shelves, yellowing parchment bound by strips of leather, an occasional scroll. He’s not into literature but Baekhyun likes to explore, and the library has always struck him as the one place that reminds him of how much the house has aged.
He walks out of his bedroom and wonders if his parents are still talking about wills and inheritance and legalities with his grandmother. They’ve been doing that for weeks now -- his mother always reluctant to broach the topic, his father neutral, his grandmother insistent about setting things in place. You cannot expect me not to do this, he overhears his grandmother once, when he stands outside the door far longer than he’s planned to. You cannot expect me to leave this world without making sure that everything has been cared for.
Baekhyun doesn’t know if anything’s going to him. In the end, he finds that he doesn’t care. But his grandmother cares, and even he can feel the urgency that gathers in her irises, the need to ensure everything will be alright even when she is gone. It’s something people are obsessed with, people who can feel their time running out, the fabled clock ticking within their hearts.
He waits outside the door, tries to make out if there is another conversation. It’s quiet, though, which can mean three things: his grandmother’s asleep, or she’s awake but she has no visitors, or she does have visitors but no one is speaking. Baekhyun decides to take the risk and turns the knob.
“Have you kept your promise, Baekhyunnie?” His grandmother is standing beside the window, hand clutching the frame for support, but she doesn’t turn around. Baekhyun wonders how she knows it’s him, and then he sees his reflection in the glass pane.
“I --” He hesitates, not wanting to disappoint her but not wanting to lie, either. “I haven’t had the time,” he says, keeping his gaze on the floor.
“Then when will you have the time?” she asks, and this time, she’s facing him. There is a steadiness to her movements despite the fact that it seems as though she will break at any given moment. “When you’ve forgotten everything?”
“I don’t even remember much,” Baekhyun says. He shoves his hands in his pockets, tries not to twist and turn his fingers in the way that he knows will have his grandmother wrinkling her brows in annoyance. “It’s -- It’s not the same.”
“Have you even tried?” She totters as she walks toward him. Baekhyun darts forward, about to offer a hand, but she gives him a look that tells him, I can do this. He relents because he knows his grandmother likes to prove that she’s stronger than she looks, but he keeps an eye on her all the same. “Have you even sat down on the bench and tried to play a piece?”
“No,” Baekhyun admits. He remembers his dream, though, the symbols that he cannot interpret anymore etched on papers that make even less sense. “No, but --”
“Go sit at the piano, young man,” his grandmother says, stopping where she is. Her tone is stern, her gaze determined. She points to the upright piano standing off in a corner of the room, cloaked in white linen. It’s newer than any of the other musical instruments hanging about, Baekhyun knows, a gift to her from his grandfather.
After a second, Baekhyun walks over to it and pulls off the cover. The piano’s polished to the hilt of gleaming, and when he presses a key, the sound it makes says that it’s been kept in tune. His grandmother’s hand weighs him down as she makes him sit down, and then she’s occupying the rest of the space on the bench. It feels a lot like old times, when he was little and still trying to remember what the sharps meant, his grandmother patiently explaining things to him.
Now she opens the folder that’s been resting on the stand, flipping through the pages and stopping at one. “Play this,” she says.
Baekhyun blinks. “This?” He can feel the sweat creating a film over his palms. “Grandma, I can’t play this.”
“And why not?” She raises an eyebrow at him and taps the page. “It’s not something you can’t handle.”
“It’s Tchaikovsky,” Baekhyun says in disbelief. “You’re asking me to play Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No. 1 Op. 23 when I haven’t played the piano in years.”
“You’re being far too dramatic about this, my dear Baekhyunnie. Are you sure you should be pursuing fashion instead of theater? At least theaters have orchestras.” Her wrist is bent, right hand settling down the ivory and black. Then she is playing the first half of the piece, traveling across the keys, chanting the notes. She stops after a few seconds and looks at him. “Don’t tell me you can’t do anything when you haven’t even lifted a finger yet. You will learn this piece, no matter how long it takes you.”
Baekhyun gulps and positions his hands. He’s just glad that his grandmother’s never felt the need to rap his knuckles with a wooden stick, like some of his tutors used to.
It’s almost sundown when his grandmother ends the lesson, the smile on her face creaking with disuse yet brilliant for its rarity. “You’ve done well,” she says, closing the folder. “Nowhere near as good as you were before, but we’ll work back up to that point soon enough. Wait here.”
Baekhyun watches as she rummages through her closet, his palms sore and his wrists tingling with effort. There is a sense of fulfillment flooding him, one that can only come from the attempt to conquer Tchaikovsky, and a strange kind of missing floods his chest. He’s never dwelt on it but he’s missed this, missed the instrument he’s grown up with for most of his life.
Her grandmother returns to his side, dropping a key in his hands. “This is for the locked cabinet in your bedroom,” she says. “There are music sheets inside it -- they’re really old, older than I am, but they won’t disintegrate when you touch them. At least, I hope not. The piano in your room is also in working condition, so I expect you to practice when you have the time.” She looks at him dead in the eye. “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Baekhyun says. “Yes, I understand.”
“Good,” she says, nodding her head. “Off with you, then. Please call your mother for me.”
Baekhyun obliges. Before he exits, though, he says, “Grandma?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you. For everything.”
He thinks her face lights up with another smile as he closes the door behind him, but Baekhyun isn’t all that certain.
÷
He’s in a different room this time, a plain space with all the windows open. Fading pictures hang on the walls. Everything is brushed over in sepia, colors toned down to their earthiest natures, but it’s a clear improvement from all that darkness.
He walks around, hesitant fingertips hovering over every single thing in the room. It’s as if the place is caught in transition -- caught in that delicate in-between dividing what is temporary and what is permanent. It’s that balance of leaving and staying; of someone moving in and planting memories on the walls, or of someone saying goodbye and taking everything away.
It’s less suffocating here. The past few dreams have left him with a gaping hole in his chest, scooping something fundamental out of him and filling him with copious amounts of emptiness. There is a demand that seeps into his skin, trying to spur him into action, but he doesn’t know what do. He doesn’t know why he sees these things. He doesn’t know what any of this is supposed to mean.
But the gentle tinkling of wind chimes and the fluttering dust give him a sense of tranquility. An odd brand of calmness that splits his anxiety into clean halves and sinks sweetly in his heart. It’s less likely to lose himself here, to forget what he’s done and who he is. The air whispers of laughter. The clock ticks with expectation. He rests an elbow on the window sill and gazes out miles of dirt road, stretching beyond the horizon.
Too late does he pick up on the clacks of approaching footsteps, the click of a knob’s gears turning, the sudden rush of stale air coming from the rest of the house. He turns, has glimpses of a gray vest and a white dress shirt; then he’s stumbling back to the corner and watching the person move about the room.
It’s when he turns around that he sees the face: features vague, skin color white, enshrouded in a pixelated buzz that has him wondering just how much he’s allowed to know. He swallows, takes a step forward. Tries to get a clearer view --
÷
He doesn’t know how he ends up with his face pressed against the carpeted floor, sunlight pooling in the small of his back and sweat coating his neck. It’s either far too late in the night or far too early in the morning. Baekhyun hoists himself up on all fours, reaches for the phone that’s sitting on the bedside table an arm’s length away from him. He blinks. It’s 2:33 in the morning, and he knows enough about silly beliefs and superstitions to have a chill raising goosebumps along his arms. It’s 27 minutes to the devil’s hour, and he really doesn’t want to be awake right now, doesn’t want to be vulnerable to any sightings or spirits about to ruin his already turbulent night.
When he closes his eyes, a face with static crackling along the edges greets him, flickering through cmyk color scheme settings and then bursting into pieces. It bothers him. There is curiosity, yes, at what the face looks like. But there is also apprehension, bubbling in the silence and spilling over when he lowers his guard.
He takes a deep breath. Then with a push, he’s standing up and stumbling back to the bed, knees collapsing halfway through. A sigh worms its way out of his lips. Baekhyun clutches the edge of the mattress for leverage and clambers up, scattered blankets slipping down an inch closer to the ground. For a few minutes, he just sits there with a hand over his heart, waiting for it to resume its normal rhythm.
At first he thinks he’s just imagining things when the pool of moonlight forming a few feet away is disturbed by a flash of darkness. It’s a slight hint of motion, something that he’s probably conjured in the depths of his thoughts.
But then a silhouette settles right in front of the open windows, and Baekhyun’s never been all that brave -- he’s never believed in ghosts and horror stories, never -- and a whimper claws at his throat. He sits there, paralyzed, unable to comprehend anything. And then he’s diving under his blankets, his pillows; he piles them all up and buries himself underneath the weight of them.
The tolling of the grandfather clock drowns out his scream.
÷
For a few days, Baekhyun falls into dreamless pits and doesn’t see anymore silhouettes. It’s a small comfort. Still, anxiety crackles in his unconsciousness, and he’s on edge most of the time. Even his familiar ritual of stitching seams and the steady hum of the sewing machine can’t soothe him.
Baekhyun continues to keep the cabinet locked, dropping the keys on his desk but never inclined to use them. He’s uncovered the piano, though, coughing a little at the dust that rises when he shakes the crochet lace. It’s still in good working condition, singing do re mi underneath his fingertips. He puts off opening the cabinet for another day.
By now, the outfits he’s making are almost finished, scraps of fabric glistening beneath the fluorescent lights. Baekhyun envisions people wearing, his head filled with the sound of applause as his hand-picked models walk down the runway. Then a blush stains his neck and cheeks and he hides his face in his hands, trying to quell the pride churning acidic in his stomach. It’s too early for him to be this ambitious.
It’s a sticky Saturday morning, sweat trailing down skin and the house more stifling than usual, when Baekhyun decides to go down again to the beach. He finds his father walking on the shore, pant legs rolled up. Something about his expression tells Baekhyun that he’s lost in thought. But then he raises his head and spots Baekhyun, and he beckons him forward with a gesture of his hands, eyebrows knitting together.
“What are you doing here?” his father asks, sticking his hands in his pockets. Baekhyun thinks it’s been some time since the two of them have talked alone. His father’s not the demonstrative type, and Baekhyun almost never sees him until late in the evening, when work hours are over and self-respecting businessmen are making their way back to their homes.
“I was thinking of going for a swim,” he says, running his hand through his hair. The sand feels gritty between his toes. “It’s too hot inside the house.”
His father nods his head in agreement. They stand there, the seconds dripping between them in silence, and it’s more than a little awkward how neither of them have anything to say to each other. Baekhyun clears his throat in search of something to say, but his father beats him to it.
“How’s your project?”
Baekhyun stills. Aside from his mother who’s taken it upon herself to support her youngest son, no one’s ever bothered asking him about his course and what he does. His father’s never opposed his decision but the disapproval is there, echoing with every crinkle of the newspaper that he reads at breakfast. Baekhyun knows his father’s wanted a lawyer in the family, or a doctor, or an accountant. He and Baekbeom do a good job at not living up to his expectations.
“It’s -- It’s fine,” he manages to say around the sudden dryness of his vocal cords. “I’m nearly done with the outfits. I just…” He hesitates, trying to gauge his father’s expression before continuing. “I just need to see if they fit the models.”
“Are you happy with it?” his father asks.
“Of course,” Baekhyun rushes to say, “Of course I am. I used to think I wouldn’t be able to last, but I did, and I don’t think I want to do anything else.” In the periphery of his vision, he senses some kind of motion but Baekhyun dismisses it as just a bird flying past.
His father sighs. “Well, that’s that,” he says. “Nothing we can do if your heart’s set on something else.” He gives Baekhyun a smile bordering on tentative and unsure. “I’ll tell your grandmother to stop pushing you to do music.”
Baekhyun’s chest squeezes in on itself. “What?” he asks. The movement, he notices, is more distinct this time. His hands feel clammy. He refuses to acknowledge what he’s seeing.
“I know I haven’t really been supportive of you and your course choice,” his father says. “But I want you to know that I’d rather have you pursue something you really want than something you were forced to take for convenience.”
Baekhyun swallows. He’s just about to say something, but then the waves come crashing and he and his father scramble backward to avoid getting hit. And the words are still there on his tongue, but Baekhyun looks up and he’s choking them down, because the silhouette is just a stone’s throw away from him.
It’s suffused in the backlit glow coming from the sun, a dark, human-shaped speck. Yet Baekhyun can feel its gaze on him, trained on his face. His inhales are slow. There’s a tap on his shoulder but Baekhyun’s immobile, and he doesn’t know what to do, why is the silhouette here --
“Baekhyun?” A hand passes over his face and Baekhyun gives a start.
He turns to his father, voice still shaking as he says, “Yes?”
His father frowns at him. “Is there something wrong?”
“Nothing,” Baekhyun says. He looks back to where the silhouette had been, and he blinks. It’s gone. There is only sun and sea and surf staring back at him. “Nothing…” he says again, but this time it’s an empty echo. Had he imagined it?
“Are you sure?” his father asks, sounding concerned.
Baekhyun nods, not quite trusting himself to speak.
“I’ll go on ahead,” his father says, hand settling warm and heavy on Baekhyun’s shoulder for a second. “Don’t stay out here too late.”
He walks off, leaving Baekhyun to stare at the spot where the silhouette was just moments ago. Maybe, maybe he was just so stressed that he’d started seeing things. With a sigh, he walks toward the edges of the shore and dives in, the water erasing bits and pieces of heat from his skin. The taste of salt rests on his tongue.
When he swims back to the surface and raises his head, he sees it. The silhouette is back, and it’s too far for him to make out what it looks like, but it’s sitting on the sand and Baekhyun knows it’s watching him.
He swallows and dives back into the water.
÷
“You didn’t practice at all.”
It’s only the two of them inside the room, Baekhyun hovering at the foot of the bed while his grandmother’s gaunt face peers at him amidst the blankets piled on her. Her hair is loose, ends curling from all the braiding, and there is something like steel in her gaze. Baekhyun shifts from foot to foot.
“It would be better if you were more honest with me.”
He breathes in. “No,” he says, and listens to the way the word seems to shatter the tranquility of the room. “I didn’t.”
It’s strange how his grandmother doesn’t say anything to that, and yet disappointment slips in through the cracks in the walls. He can feel it settling, thick and viscous, in the very air between them. Baekhyun doesn’t like it, this feeling -- doesn’t like looking at his grandmother and finding only a certain blankness on her face.
“Well,” she says, and sighs. “I guess I was wrong. It can’t be helped that you’re not interested in music anymore. Perhaps you grew out of it a long time ago and I pretended not to notice.”
Baekhyun wants to tell her, No. He wants to say, I haven’t grown out of it at all. It’s still here, in my bones. But how to say those things, how to admit to them, when at the end of the day he’ll be more preoccupied with basting techniques than Chopin’s Nocturne in C sharp minor? He feels like he’s holding a tangled skein of yarn in his hands, desperately trying to pick apart the strands and only ending up making more knots.
“I don’t want to force you,” she says. “I never wanted to. It is simply that I saw potential in you, and talent. And, for a time, I thought you loved music as much as I did -- as I do -- and that was true. Now, I don’t think it is anymore.”
Something heavy clambers up his rib cage. It is twice the weight of any emotion he’s ever encountered, and Baekhyun thinks it’s a lot like sadness. He doesn’t understand himself anymore. He doesn’t know what he wants.
He opens his mouth to speak then stops.
Leaning against the headboard is the silhouette, obscured in the shadows and carrying an aura of judgment. He glances at his grandmother, wondering if she’s noticed it, if he must point it out to her. But the silhouette begins moving, and Baekhyun watches in horror as it brings a finger up to its lips. He shudders.
“Baekhyun? Are you listening to me?”
It takes him a lot of effort to stay in his place and not bolt out of the door. “Yes,” he says, hoping the silhouette will disappear.
His grandmother frowns. “You’re acting very odd today,” she says.
Baekhyun holds back the urge to say, You’d be acting very odd, too, if you could see that thing following me! He doesn’t want to draw more attention than he has to. He’ll just be pegged as insane and off his rocker.
“I’m fine,” he says. “I -- grandma --”
She holds up a hand. “I’m not expecting you to continue playing the piano if you don’t want to,” she says, and the silhouette is coming near, and Baekhyun is panicking. “But maybe you can make it a hobby? Don’t let the tradition die, Baekhyun. This family has always had a musician.”
Something about her tone unsettles him. It makes him think of his monochromatic dreams, of sheets consumed into ashes and enormous performance halls and the faint melody lying beneath. His mother’s told him about this -- about her sister Sunyoung, who’d inherited the musical genes and now toured the world with an orchestra. Always someone in the family, Baekhyun, he remembers her whispering in his ear after his piano tutor left. I guess, for this generation, it is you.
The silhouette tilts his head, as if knowing what he is thinking.
“I’ll think about it,” he says, fingers digging into his palms. “I’ll try to get in an hour or so of practice when I can.”
“That is a compromise, then,” his grandmother says, pursing her lips. “Very well, Baekhyunnie. I hope you play the death march during my funeral.”
Baekhyun steps back, the statement a slap on his face. “Grandmother --”
She laughs, and Baekhyun must be imagining it but the silhouette is curled around her now, sinking into her blankets and draping itself on her skin. “I’m only kidding, dear boy,” she says, although her mirth is less real and more artificial than Baekhyun’s ever seen.
She’s not kidding at all, and both of them know it. The truth is a subtle little thing, darting back and forth between them, but it’s there. He looks at her and sees an old woman holding on to the fraying strings of life keeping her together.
He looks at her, and he sees how much she’s wanted to let go a long time ago.
Baekhyun takes a step back. “Alright then, grandmother,” he says, keeping his voice as steady as possible. “I’ll be going now.”
When he takes one last glimpse, he sees the silhouette perched on the seat by his grandmother’s bedside, no longer watching him.
÷
It feels more like a memory than a dream this time. He’s back in their family’s house, sitting at his desk with an armload of fabrics and a sewing machine. There are pins scattered throughout the surface. Thread winds round his wrist, and measuring tape hangs from his neck, and feathers nest in his hair.
He sits back, allowing the velvet to spill into his lap as he cuts out the patterns for the dress he’s making. The clock ticks the seconds away in a corner of his room. It’s warm despite the presence of an air conditioning unit, the cold coming in short intervals that dissipate all too easily in the humidity.
The sound of the phone ringing creeps in through the cracks in the doorframe. He sighs and sets down the velvet, taking care to place the needle and pins inside the kit so they won’t roll down to the floor. Three rings now. He pushes back the chair and turns around.
There, sitting on the bed, is the same static figure. Except right now it’s not so static, every detail sharpened to the nth degree, and it takes all of his willpower to hold his ground. Because the figure is turning its head, and he wants to know what it looks like so, so bad. He wants but he’s scared, and his hands are clenched.
Staring back at him is a face he’s lived with for 20 years. The slanted, small eyes, the slightly wide nose, the thin pink lips with the mole on the upper right corner. Shock runs through his veins. He knows what he’s looking at. He knows this face, has known it for a long time.
It’s the same face he sees in the mirror every day, when he’s rimming his eyes with eyeliner; every night, when he’s about to go to bed and trying to gauge how bad his skin is. It’s facing him down, and the figure is dressed in white longsleeves, a black vest, black slacks and black leather shoes. He looks down at his own pajamas.
For the first time, the figure speaks:
“Hello, Baekhyunnie.”
One | Two
Author: Anonymous until 1/30/14
For: saphirediva
Pairing: Baekhyun/Baekhyun
Word Count: 20,340
Summary: He finds him in between the folds of reality.
Warnings: character death
Rating: PG-13
One
The phone rings in the middle of a summer evening sticky with heat, and Baekhyun hears it all the way from his work table. Pinned to his cork board are swatches of fabric and color charts, and his eyes glance from his sewing machine to salmon pink silk, before pushing back his chair. He glares at the aircon sputtering out rare bursts of cold air before kicking open the door.
His mother answers the call first.
Baekhyun stares at the thin, sharp lines of her form bent against the wall with the headset pressed against the side of her face. A sigh escapes his lips. He lingers in the hallway with the weight of not wanting to agonize over another blasted seam and the zipper that keeps coming apart. His mother turns around and sees him, and worry makes her face resemble a crumpled piece of paper, and her slim hand beckons him to come forward. Call your father, she mouths.
She’s upset -- he can tell it from the way her eyes are a bit too bright and her lips are molded into a frown pushed back by sheer will. He does as she says and leaves his parents there in the hallway, footsteps fading back to his own room.
He wonders what’s wrong and what the call is for, but he has a dress to make. Baekhyun falls right back into the rhythm of needle and thread, and thoughts about the call flicker into non-existence, and the swatches glimmer under the fluorescent lights.
÷
He wakes up in the back of the car with his limbs still in pajamas and his hair a nest of thread and maybe safety pins. His older brother is draped over a backpack and a suitcase, and he seems to be in no hurry to yawn awake anytime soon. Baekhyun scratches his neck and shifts his joints into a more comfortable seating position. Scenery darts past. Confusion slips through his fingers.
“Where are we going?” he croaks out, voice coming out rusty. He winces and tries to untangle the spool of red cotton-wool blend from his hair.
“Your grandmother’s house,” his father says. He’s up there in the driver’s seat, hands on the wheel and feet on the pedals, and he glances at Baekhyun through the rearview mirror. “She’s ill, so we’re going to help take care of her.”
Baekhyun presses his cheek against the window, ignoring the way his head thumps a bit on the tempered glass every time the car hits a bump in the road. All he remembers about his grandmother are wisps of vanilla-scented smoke rising from candles and soft, wrinkled skin and piping-hot cookies on days when he’s been a good boy. The last time he’d visited her feels almost like a century ago, though in actuality it’s only been a little over five years. Still he has glimpses of the sea in his memories -- snapshots of an old, elegant manor resting on a hill, cascading downwards to wrought iron gates and sand and miles of water; of the breeze tasting salty on his tongue, and the sun painting his skin a delicate shade of red.
He remembers his grandmother’s steady steps and the way her throaty voice had spun the very air she breathed into songs more beautiful than anything Baekhyun had ever heard. She’d taught him every single note rising and falling on lines of musical staff, tapping rhythm on the back of his hand and taught him never to need a metronome, until fugues and symphonies and concertos were burned into the backs of his eyelids. In return, he’d chosen to pursue a degree in fashion.
Sometimes, he finds himself spread out on the bed with melodies overflowing in his mind. Baekhyun likes music, has grown up with it, has inhaled it every second of his life. But he’d fallen in love with something else somewhere along the way, and there are times when he finds himself wondering how different things would have been.
He shakes off the thoughts and looks down at his needle-nicked hands. Perhaps he still has some lingering affection left for emotions buried in music, but for now his consciousness comes alive with color wheels and expert stitching.
Up front, his mother reaches out to turn on the radio. Baekhyun lets his eyes flutter shut.
÷
They arrive at his grandmother’s manor a little past eight in the morning, and as Baekhyun stumbles out of the car with eyes half-blurred by sleep, he’s hit by the familiar scent of brine. His brother runs into him and Baekhyun only just maintains his balance.
“Help us get the suitcases out,” his mother says, walking past the two of them with several boxes in her arms. Baekhyun blinks at her, then at his brother’s sleepy form, then at the luggage that his father’s unloading from the trunk.
He frowns. “How long are we staying here? We brought a lot of things.”
“I don’t know,” his mother says. She purses her lips and worry runs down the curves of her face. “We’re staying until your grandmother gets better.”
Baekhyun opens his mouth then closes it. There’s something in his mind, something that needs to be said, something that’s very much like But what if she doesn’t? He catches himself just in time and turns to help his father. His brother’s a dead weight by now, clutching onto the door handle for support, eyes foggy with the haze of dreams.
The caretaker rushes down to help them the moment they start straggling toward the manor’s patio. Baekhyun thinks he should be self-conscious about walking around in pajamas with bunnies on them, especially since he’s majoring in fashion, but right now he’s just a robot. He wants to bring in all of their belongings and maybe plop down on a soft mattress with nice springs so he can bounce off of it, and he rolls in the suitcases with a sigh.
He stands in the living room as everyone else rushes about: His father’s still bringing in more things, his mother’s rushed upstairs to his grandmother’s bedroom, the caretaker’s struggling under the weight of a vase which Baekhyun thinks has no business being here, and his brother’s slumped over the couch with his backpack slipping down to the floor. It feels a little emptier than usual, a little sadder -- a little like the sun hasn’t peeled back the curtains like it used to and filled the place with warmth. It’s far, far different from the images in Baekhyun’s head.
He almost doesn’t register the house help now spilling into the living room, fussing around with the suitcases and taking them to different rooms. Baekhyun sees one of them prop his brother up in a more comfortable position, tucking a pillow in his arms.
“Where’s grandmother?” he asks, and the question is directed to his father but it’s one of the maids who answers.
“In the master bedroom, like always,” she says.
Baekhyun looks at his father, who nods, and then he’s climbing up the stairs. Of course his grandmother’s in the master bedroom, surrounded by shelves upon shelves of musical sheets, violins gleaming behind display cases. The master bedroom, where portraits of her and her husband hang on the right side, facing the windows so that We can always see the light, Baekhyun.
He pushes open the door.
It’s silent, more silent than Baekhyun’s ever known it to be. His grandmother once told him that there was music in silence, a beat existing beneath the quiet surroundings, a melody threaded through the the things that are always left unsaid. She’d told him that it was okay to let words die once in a while, whenever he’d rushed through rests and pauses faster than they were supposed to be played.
Five years later, the absence of sound still unsettles him.
His mother’s pulled up a chair and is sitting by the bedside, her expression unreadable and her hands folded on her lap.
“Did they tell you what the problem was?” Baekhyun asks, coming over to stand beside her.
She shakes her head. “It’s just...age,” she says. “She’s getting old. Her body’s not the same anymore.” She reaches out and rests her hand on his grandmother’s arm. “You should go unpack your things.”
Baekhyun hesitates, looking down at his grandmother. There is white braided into her once-lustrous black hair. Her face is creased with paper-thin frowns, fine wrinkles and slashes of time. Her chest rises and falls. Baekhyun remembers her singing him a lullaby whenever he’d had difficulty sleeping as a child, and right now he wants to play that for her.
“Are you sure?”
His mother nods. “Yes, I’m sure. Go on, now. She’ll be awake later, I’m sure, and you’ll get to talk to her.”
He lingers for one more second, one more breath. And then he’s exiting the room and going back down the stairs, every footfall echoing empty staccato in such a huge manor. Baekbeom is still passed out on the couch, Baekhyun’s father is going through their luggage, and the househelp are fluttering about.
“Do you need help with anything?” Baekhyun asks, crouching next to a red suitcase.
“It’s fine,” his father says. “You can go up if you want to, though. Your room is the third one on the left, the one where you used to sleep whenever we visited. Do you remember?”
Images of blue-gray curtains and a boarded-up fireplace flash in muted frame-by-frames in Baekhyun’s mind. He thinks of beds with maroon comforters that pull you in deeper, of a piano shrouded in crochet lace and dust and neglect, of locked cabinets and thick carpets. “Yeah, I do.”
He picks up his bags and shoos away any of the housemaids coming to help him. Baekhyun wanders through the corridors of the second floor, and as he passes by each closed door, it’s as if there is a sunlit-drenched version of himself running past. He used to play here, amazed by the sheer size of everything and peeking inside rooms.
He stops in front of his assigned bedroom.
It’s been years since he’s last been here, and nostalgia creeps its way in the way it does when Baekhyun lets all his guards fall, broken, to the ground. He rests his palm on the knob for a while, trying to replicate the feeling of being eight years old and unable to reach the knob without tiptoeing. Then he’s pushing the door open, and the scent of old things hits him, and Baekhyun stands in the doorway. Everything looks the same, and yet everything seems to have changed. He places his bags on a spot near the desk and then he’s flopping, back first, on the bed.
He rolls over and turns his head to the side, where the piano stands.
Even throughout the entire time that his grandmother had taught him how to play, Baekhyun had never been allowed to use this particular instrument. It had always been locked up and tucked beneath folds of cloth. He used to think it was some kind of magic piano, that maybe it was broken, and it was better that his grandmother trained him to play herpiano instead.
Now he thinks it’s just another object aging with all the weight of tunes that have never been sung. He brings his hands up and stares at them, at the maroon bleeding through the spaces in his fingers from the bed’s canopy. Baekhyun sighs.
He wonders if, after all this time, he can still read music sheets and understand what they mean in a language that’s never needed words.
It’s different from fashion. It’s different, because though the medium of sound comes in the form of an instrument and is tangible, music itself isn’t. It is not as concrete as back panelings and hidden seams, as substantial as silk and linen and cotton and wool. Baekhyun can go up and down the scales and still not know why octaves come out the way they do, but he can understand fabric. He can interpret every twist and turn of expert stitching and come away burdened by new techniques.
Maybe it had been less about wanting to veer from tradition, from what he’d grown up with. Maybe it had been more about the comfort of knowing what exactly you are working with, that if you did things a certain way, there would be consistency.
He sighs and grabs the nearest pillow, and decides to go to sleep in order to stop the thoughts waging a war in his head.
÷
Darkness flakes into blacks and grays and dark blues when he so much as breathes in the room. He touches the desk and his fingers look like they are covered in soot, the tint coming apart when he rubs his palms together. Every move, he finds out, is delayed by a millisecond. He’s not sure if his feet are on the ground anymore. He’s not sure if they should even be.
Sunlight dances through the spaces between the curtains, settling on patches of wall and ceiling and floor in bursts of white. There are too many shadows it cannot drive away. Baekhyun is head under in oblivion, hidden from sight and tucked away in a corner. He raises a hand and places it on his chest, waiting for the heartbeat that thumps a tad slower than it normally does. He wonders if this is a nightmare, the kind that snaps you up and swallows you whole, until you are unable to escape.
Something shifts in the periphery of his vision, breaking away from the blank space that the room has become. At first it is hard to pin down, difficult to name and assign a form to -- it is a blend of light and darkness, bridging the gap between transparency and opacity. The shape wavers, changes, movements sluggish and uncertain. It stumbles to the window, unraveling and then gathering itself close.
Baekhyun blinks, and it becomes a human figure. A charcoal sketch, wobbling just the tiniest bit as it leans its head with indecipherable features against the glass. Its hands tap out a nameless, silent beat that tiptoes toward Baekhyun and then brushes past him.
It’s not even cold, but he shivers.
He takes a step forward, disturbing the shadows wrapping themselves around his ankles. Somewhere in the distance, Baekhyun can hear a faint melody playing, but it sounds too far away for him to fully grasp it. He lifts his hand, points it toward the figure -- his lips part and his breaths come quick -- his feet take five, six more steps forward --
Light pierces the silhouette, cutting it up into bits and pieces that tumble back to the shadows.
÷
“Baekhyun?”
He jolts awake at his name being called, blinking up at the slope of his brother’s chin and the threadbare eyelashes fluttering down at him. Fatigue is etched into Baekbeom’s features, a chicken scrawl mess that leaves him only just coherent enough to fight back a yawn.
“What is it?” he asks, hand running through his hair and tension gathering in his shoulders. His watch tells him it’s 5 pm now, and the familiar orange hues of sunset are turning the red brocade of the drapings into flames.
“We need to come down,” his brother says. “It’s dinner time.” Without looking back to see if his younger brother is following, Baekbeom pivots on his foot and turns, walking straight out of the bedroom. Baekhyun is left to press his forehead against his knees, a strange feeling working its way up his toes. He dreamed of something, he knows -- something vivid and startling and confusing. Trying to hold on to it is fruitless, aimless, and he’s grasping for the tattered edges of a thing that he won’t ever be able to catch.
He groans and tumbles out of bed. He’s still in his sleep pajamas, sweat salty on his skin, but he decides to shower after dinner. His parents don’t like it when he’s late to the table. It’s rude to make food wait, he can almost hear his mother say.
They settle at the table, all four of them, and Baekhyun is too hesitant to ask after his grandmother. Baekbeom is drifting off even though he’s sitting right across Baekhyun, head tilting just the tiniest bit to the right, eyes unfocused. His father sips his coffee. Beside Baekhyun, his mother is a shade paler and her skin is crowded with lines of worry, her shaking knuckles betraying her fatigue. Baekhyun looks down as he swallows his soup.
Baekbeom leans back in his chair and asks, “How long are we staying here?” A yawn flits off from his mouth.
“Three months, maybe four,” his mother says. “We’ll wait until your grandmother gets better.”
Or gets worse, Baekhyun tacks on. His mother doesn’t say it but the implication hovers over them. The rice tastes a lot like cardboard now; the juice isn’t enough to sweeten the bitterness of the bile rising in Baekhyun’s throat. He forces them down anyway.
When dinner is over, the house help swoop in before Baekhyun’s father can so much as tell his sons to clear the table. They stand there for a few minutes, not quite sure what to do, and then their gazes intersect. Baekbeom stumbles off to the couch and slumps down the cushions, body bent in awkward angles. Baekhyun follows his mother up to his grandmother’s room, while his father totters off to turn on the television.
His grandmother is sitting up on her bed when they enter, vein-riddled hands gripping the comforter. Her hair looks as if it’s just been brushed, and though she seems to drown in the size of her bed, her brown eyes are clear and determined. Baekhyun lingers by the doorway while his mother goes to sit by the bedside, murmurs of Mother, you’re awake trailing after her.
“Come closer, Baekhyunnie,” his grandmother says. Baekhyun hesitates, watches the soft downturn of her lips, takes in the brief sparks catching in her eyes. Her eyebrows knit together and she pats a spot beside her, more insistent this time. “Come here.”
His mother looks back at him and nods. Baekhyun walks toward them and sits on the edge of the bed, near his grandmother’s feet. She glances at him then at the spot she’d indicated before. She doesn’t press it, though.
“How are you?” she rasps out, and Baekhyun’s not sure if he’s the one she’s asking. Her gaze seems fixated on a point between her grandson and her daughter.
“Fine, mother,” Baekhyun’s mother says. She reaches out to take her mother’s hand. “We’re all doing really well. But what about you? The doctor said --”
“I’m not going to die,” Baekhyun’s grandmother interrupts. “Not yet, Sojin, so you can stop looking at me like you are about to lose me.”
His mother flinches and looks away. Baekhyun is snared in his grandmother’s vision now, the only focus point left between the two of them, and for some reason he’s nervous. There is a strange intensity building in the room and it’s coiled around his neck, growing tighter and tighter even though he’s trying to keep his breathing steady.
“What about you, young man?” his grandmother asks. “How are your studies going?”
“I’ve been well, grandmother,” he says. His voice is rough sandpaper caressing wood. “I’m graduating in a couple of years, and I’ve been invited to showcase my designs in a fashion show that the university is holding.”
His grandmother squints at him. “And what about music? The piano?”
“I - I don’t play the piano anymore, grandmother,” Baekhyun stutters. The planes of his grandmother’s face seem harsher, her cheekbones jutting out bone-white against her skin. She looks as if she’s barely been put together, loose ends fraying and ready to break at any moment.
But her spine is stiff and her head held high, and there is something like defiance in the way her lips are set. “Why not?” she asks.
Baekhyun’s mother steps in then, tone gentle as she says, “Mother, Baekhyun is pursuing a different field now. He has no time left to devote to music.”
His grandmother snorts. “Nonsense. There is always time for music! In fact, Sojin, there is always time for everything as long as you don’t squander the minutes you have been given. Baekhyunnie, that is no excuse. Playing the piano is a skill you might need in the future, and even if it doesn’t have anything to do with fashion, it’s still something worth cultivating. Or are you telling me that all those years I’ve spent drilling you are all just going to waste?”
“Of course not, grandmother,” he says, crumpling beneath her stare. “I’ll keep practicing.”
“Good.” All the energy comes out of her then and she slumps in her pillows, face looking more tired than ever. Her skin sags as if it cannot bear to carry her bones and clothe them. “I’d like to have passed on something before I leave this world.”
Baekhyun bites his lip. He can see his mother struggling, trying to come up with something to say, but in the end air just gushes out of her mouth and she rubs her mother’s arm in a soothing manner. Baekhyun thinks of how long he’s left his music sheets to rot in his closet. He’s not certain that he can still read notes and play as well as he used to.
When his grandmother speaks again, she’s looking at the instruments on her walls. “So much talent,” she whispers. “So much talent in this blood. I hope you realize that, young man. It’s nice that you’re trying something new, but don’t forget the music. You will find it closer to kin than most other people do.” She pins him with a look then, one that Baekhyun cannot find it in himself to describe. “Do you understand?”
“I understand,” he murmurs.
She nods. “Very well. I need to speak to your mother for a while now, so maybe you can start fulfilling your promise and practice with the piano in your room, yes?”
Baekhyun stands up and gives a noncommittal shake of his head, crossing the line between yes and no. He’ll let his grandmother decide for herself what it means.
With that, he leaves the room, but not before hearing his grandmother ask: “How much time do I have left?”
÷
He is standing backstage, soaked in nerves from head to toe. Static is embedded into the pads of his fingers, crackling when he so much as touches a nearby wall, and his wrists tingle. It’s odd how the place is so quiet -- something about the lack of sound strikes a wrong chord within him. It feels incomplete.
He walks out to the stage, a vast wooden platform covered from sight by heavy velvet curtains. Dust settles on everything and tickles his nose. He can build a one-storey house in here, or hold a ball, or raise an entire community of people. There is a feeling trapped beneath his skin, one of combined anxiety and excitement. He flops to the ground and lies down.
Up above, a hundred different kinds of lights shine down on him, coating him in lurid hues of blue and green and red. Multicolored spots dance in his vision. Expectation thrums throughout the stage, as if it is watching and waiting for what he will do next.
When he sits up again, the entire place dims until a single spotlight is trained on the middle. He watches the curtains rise, watches the empty chairs judging him even in the gloom. He turns back around, and there is a piano caught in the circle of orange-white, its surface gleaming. He tries to walk toward it but it feels like he is being held back, bolted down to his spot by something greater than he can comprehend.
Black drips from the surrounding darkness, blobs of it all stacked up until the form becomes liquid, taking on a human shape. He thinks that there must be a vague suggestion of a face but it’s out of focus, pixelating in low quality color blocks and fading out of his consciousness. It approaches the piano with a purposeful stride and settles on the bench, feet pressing down the pedals and fingers splayed on the keys.
The melody is stronger this time, more noticeable but still indistinguishable. It’s as if it’s coming toward him, closer and closer until the distance has bowed out of the way and left nothing between them, and he cannot make it out. He hears an F sharp, a minor E maybe. Vague chords rise out of air. He watches as the figure continues playing, its form a jelly-like substance rippling with every movement.
There is something familiar about the figure, taunting him and asking him how he hasn’t figured out its secrets yet. It rankles, and he’s left to deal with questions that tumble against his skull, questions he cannot answer. Questions that roll in rivers of thought, tossed from wave to wave and coming out smooth, drifting back to shore.
The curtains drop down.
÷
Baekhyun goes down to the beach two nights after he wrestles with his mannequins and tries to figure out why the diagonal seams aren’t diagonal. His visits to his grandmother have dwindled to naked seconds spent lingering just outside the room. He doesn’t particularly want to tell his grandmother that the piano remains covered, and Baekhyun is too caught up in sewing clothes, and anyway there is nothing to play. There are probably music sheets here but he doesn’t know where they are, so he thinks there is no point at all in even trying.
It takes a bit of walking to get to the beach, but Baekhyun slathers sunscreen on his nape and arms and whistles the entire way. He tries not to think of the dreams that have been brewing in the deepest corners of his mind, taking root in the way they always do, and slipping out of reach before Baekhyun can even begin to recall them. It’s frustrating and he’s spent sunrises in bed with his eyes wide open, and he just wants to know what they mean. To at least have pieces of them that he can keep, so he can somehow understand.
The water is freezing when he dips his feet into it, careful not to scratch his heels on jagged rocks. He debates swimming but without a companion, Baekhyun doesn’t want to risk it. Instead he walks like that, pant legs rolled up to his thighs, looking for seashells down the entire length of the beach. It’s lonely here, and quiet. His grandmother’s property is removed from the rest of the community.
He thinks of the mint green blazer now thrown on the bed, its zipper just the slightest bit crooked. He thinks of the peplum blouse with too big ruffles and an awkward fit. He thinks and thinks, and Baekhyun finds that he doesn’t want to think anymore. He wants to run. His project’s less of a chance to prove himself, and more of a tumor-inducing headache threatening to take his life away. It’s hard, correcting the little slip-ups -- the slant, the haphazard patterns, the incorrect kind of fabric.
The breeze cards through his hair and salt spray smacks him in the face, but Baekhyun just sinks deeper into the water. It’s a little warmer now, the heat burrowing into the ocean, and Baekhyun basks there for a few more minutes. He wonders if his grandmother is having a conversation with his parents again. Despite the iron glinting in the old woman’s eyes, they can all feel the end
crawling toward them.
Yesterday, he’d overheard them talking about the appraisal of the estate’s value and the art pieces. Baekhyun hadn’t stayed to find out specific details, but he knew the beginning of goodbye, knew the necessary preparations that one made before leaving. He knew, and he’d gone to his room and stared at the covered piano for hours.
He looks up at the mansion, standing tall and ageless against the horizon, and he sighs. It’s been five years. He shouldn’t be this attached to the place, or unsure about the decisions he’s made. It’s not as if things are meant to last forever.
Baekhyun knows that, and as he wraps the towel around himself, he wonders why he still feels like he’s standing on rocky ground.
÷
Flames lick the air around him in bright shades of red and orange, dancing on wicks and wax pooling in glass candle holders. The windows are all thrown open, and moonlight marks its spot on the wooden floor, curtains rustling with every breath.
There are sheets of lined paper scattered on the desk, hundreds of them. Musical notes are scribbled all over the staff, black ink smudging somewhere along the way, and several have been crossed out. He picks one up, studies the unraveling of a symphony -- he knows it’s supposed to make sense but it doesn’t, not to him, and he can only just pick out the do, the re, the mi.
Just like before, black flakes off the darkness, and bits and pieces of it slot against each other to create a makeshift human form. It adjusts proportions, carves anatomy out of shadows. Against the flames, a figure with its head bent and hands fisted settles over the scattered papers. He thinks he can see the outline of a pen, slashing frustration across pages and pages of symbols, creating and destroying and starting over again.
It doesn’t make much sense to him. But then he thinks of his own failed designs and the difficulty of execution, of nights spent looking for perfection and only coming up with something that’s not even close. The ability to create isn’t for the sane. It isn’t for those with simple aspirations, who can walk away and not look back.
He’s never tried to compose songs, and maybe he can’t quite sympathize with the figure, but it’s a waste. It’s a waste, these bits and pieces of charred plant pulp falling to the ground. Paper confetti, all of them -- ripped up and thrown and reduced to ashes. The figure keeps writing. Its motions are furious now. There is a certain kind of desperation in the way it writes faster and faster and faster.
When the flames burn brighter, they become fixed twin points of passion, growing and growing until there is nothing else to see.
÷
He stares at the mannequins propped on his desk, all prepped up with nowhere to go. In the back of his mind, there’s a little nudge telling him he should be happy that his prototypes are done and look as similar to his drawings as they will ever be. But Baekhyun’s too fixated on the wooden surface and remembering how, in last night’s dream, it had succumbed beneath the mess of papers and pens and ink.
It’s hard, putting the dreams in corners where Baekhyun can avoid them. There is something unsettling about them and the way they seem to be forming a pattern, changing every time and yet somehow linked to the last, and he almost drowns in their clamor to be remembered. They tug at him in the moments when there is nothing to occupy him. He grows wary of empty spaces in the house, now. Where shadows lurk, he sees flashes of the figure forming, and a chill trails up his spine.
It reminds him of the penny papers his classmates used to buy from the vendor in front of the middle school, newsprint staining their fingers gray when they sat on desks and read the stories out loud. Horror, his friend Jongdae would say, the cat-like corners of his lips turned up. Jongdae would invade Baekhyun’s space and swing his legs in glee while brandishing the paper in front of him. He’d pry off the hands Baekhyun covered his ears with and, with a dramatic exhale, begin to act out the tale of a man seeing a ghost in the bathroom. It was strange, the sensationalism of these stories. Ladies in white appearing in mirrors, and the sound of chains being dragged down an empty hallway, and spirits that came to wreck lives or exact vengeance -- all of these used to scare Baekhyun witless. Jongdae knew, and so Jongdae would pick the worst of them all.
Baekhyun’s never believed, tries not to believe, in the supernatural. In high school he’d convinced himself that the stories Jongdae told him were created for the cheap thrill, the momentary burst of adrenaline. Still, he shrouds himself in blankets at night and wonders if there is any merit to them at all, his suspicions only heightened ever since the dreams began.
The house is old, after all. It’s said hello and goodbye to lives more ancient than his grandparents’, dating back centuries. Baekhyun’s reminded of it whenever he walks into the library and gets hit, not by the clouds of dust, but by the knowledge the place has accumulated. He’s seen medieval texts in the shelves, yellowing parchment bound by strips of leather, an occasional scroll. He’s not into literature but Baekhyun likes to explore, and the library has always struck him as the one place that reminds him of how much the house has aged.
He walks out of his bedroom and wonders if his parents are still talking about wills and inheritance and legalities with his grandmother. They’ve been doing that for weeks now -- his mother always reluctant to broach the topic, his father neutral, his grandmother insistent about setting things in place. You cannot expect me not to do this, he overhears his grandmother once, when he stands outside the door far longer than he’s planned to. You cannot expect me to leave this world without making sure that everything has been cared for.
Baekhyun doesn’t know if anything’s going to him. In the end, he finds that he doesn’t care. But his grandmother cares, and even he can feel the urgency that gathers in her irises, the need to ensure everything will be alright even when she is gone. It’s something people are obsessed with, people who can feel their time running out, the fabled clock ticking within their hearts.
He waits outside the door, tries to make out if there is another conversation. It’s quiet, though, which can mean three things: his grandmother’s asleep, or she’s awake but she has no visitors, or she does have visitors but no one is speaking. Baekhyun decides to take the risk and turns the knob.
“Have you kept your promise, Baekhyunnie?” His grandmother is standing beside the window, hand clutching the frame for support, but she doesn’t turn around. Baekhyun wonders how she knows it’s him, and then he sees his reflection in the glass pane.
“I --” He hesitates, not wanting to disappoint her but not wanting to lie, either. “I haven’t had the time,” he says, keeping his gaze on the floor.
“Then when will you have the time?” she asks, and this time, she’s facing him. There is a steadiness to her movements despite the fact that it seems as though she will break at any given moment. “When you’ve forgotten everything?”
“I don’t even remember much,” Baekhyun says. He shoves his hands in his pockets, tries not to twist and turn his fingers in the way that he knows will have his grandmother wrinkling her brows in annoyance. “It’s -- It’s not the same.”
“Have you even tried?” She totters as she walks toward him. Baekhyun darts forward, about to offer a hand, but she gives him a look that tells him, I can do this. He relents because he knows his grandmother likes to prove that she’s stronger than she looks, but he keeps an eye on her all the same. “Have you even sat down on the bench and tried to play a piece?”
“No,” Baekhyun admits. He remembers his dream, though, the symbols that he cannot interpret anymore etched on papers that make even less sense. “No, but --”
“Go sit at the piano, young man,” his grandmother says, stopping where she is. Her tone is stern, her gaze determined. She points to the upright piano standing off in a corner of the room, cloaked in white linen. It’s newer than any of the other musical instruments hanging about, Baekhyun knows, a gift to her from his grandfather.
After a second, Baekhyun walks over to it and pulls off the cover. The piano’s polished to the hilt of gleaming, and when he presses a key, the sound it makes says that it’s been kept in tune. His grandmother’s hand weighs him down as she makes him sit down, and then she’s occupying the rest of the space on the bench. It feels a lot like old times, when he was little and still trying to remember what the sharps meant, his grandmother patiently explaining things to him.
Now she opens the folder that’s been resting on the stand, flipping through the pages and stopping at one. “Play this,” she says.
Baekhyun blinks. “This?” He can feel the sweat creating a film over his palms. “Grandma, I can’t play this.”
“And why not?” She raises an eyebrow at him and taps the page. “It’s not something you can’t handle.”
“It’s Tchaikovsky,” Baekhyun says in disbelief. “You’re asking me to play Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No. 1 Op. 23 when I haven’t played the piano in years.”
“You’re being far too dramatic about this, my dear Baekhyunnie. Are you sure you should be pursuing fashion instead of theater? At least theaters have orchestras.” Her wrist is bent, right hand settling down the ivory and black. Then she is playing the first half of the piece, traveling across the keys, chanting the notes. She stops after a few seconds and looks at him. “Don’t tell me you can’t do anything when you haven’t even lifted a finger yet. You will learn this piece, no matter how long it takes you.”
Baekhyun gulps and positions his hands. He’s just glad that his grandmother’s never felt the need to rap his knuckles with a wooden stick, like some of his tutors used to.
It’s almost sundown when his grandmother ends the lesson, the smile on her face creaking with disuse yet brilliant for its rarity. “You’ve done well,” she says, closing the folder. “Nowhere near as good as you were before, but we’ll work back up to that point soon enough. Wait here.”
Baekhyun watches as she rummages through her closet, his palms sore and his wrists tingling with effort. There is a sense of fulfillment flooding him, one that can only come from the attempt to conquer Tchaikovsky, and a strange kind of missing floods his chest. He’s never dwelt on it but he’s missed this, missed the instrument he’s grown up with for most of his life.
Her grandmother returns to his side, dropping a key in his hands. “This is for the locked cabinet in your bedroom,” she says. “There are music sheets inside it -- they’re really old, older than I am, but they won’t disintegrate when you touch them. At least, I hope not. The piano in your room is also in working condition, so I expect you to practice when you have the time.” She looks at him dead in the eye. “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Baekhyun says. “Yes, I understand.”
“Good,” she says, nodding her head. “Off with you, then. Please call your mother for me.”
Baekhyun obliges. Before he exits, though, he says, “Grandma?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you. For everything.”
He thinks her face lights up with another smile as he closes the door behind him, but Baekhyun isn’t all that certain.
÷
He’s in a different room this time, a plain space with all the windows open. Fading pictures hang on the walls. Everything is brushed over in sepia, colors toned down to their earthiest natures, but it’s a clear improvement from all that darkness.
He walks around, hesitant fingertips hovering over every single thing in the room. It’s as if the place is caught in transition -- caught in that delicate in-between dividing what is temporary and what is permanent. It’s that balance of leaving and staying; of someone moving in and planting memories on the walls, or of someone saying goodbye and taking everything away.
It’s less suffocating here. The past few dreams have left him with a gaping hole in his chest, scooping something fundamental out of him and filling him with copious amounts of emptiness. There is a demand that seeps into his skin, trying to spur him into action, but he doesn’t know what do. He doesn’t know why he sees these things. He doesn’t know what any of this is supposed to mean.
But the gentle tinkling of wind chimes and the fluttering dust give him a sense of tranquility. An odd brand of calmness that splits his anxiety into clean halves and sinks sweetly in his heart. It’s less likely to lose himself here, to forget what he’s done and who he is. The air whispers of laughter. The clock ticks with expectation. He rests an elbow on the window sill and gazes out miles of dirt road, stretching beyond the horizon.
Too late does he pick up on the clacks of approaching footsteps, the click of a knob’s gears turning, the sudden rush of stale air coming from the rest of the house. He turns, has glimpses of a gray vest and a white dress shirt; then he’s stumbling back to the corner and watching the person move about the room.
It’s when he turns around that he sees the face: features vague, skin color white, enshrouded in a pixelated buzz that has him wondering just how much he’s allowed to know. He swallows, takes a step forward. Tries to get a clearer view --
÷
He doesn’t know how he ends up with his face pressed against the carpeted floor, sunlight pooling in the small of his back and sweat coating his neck. It’s either far too late in the night or far too early in the morning. Baekhyun hoists himself up on all fours, reaches for the phone that’s sitting on the bedside table an arm’s length away from him. He blinks. It’s 2:33 in the morning, and he knows enough about silly beliefs and superstitions to have a chill raising goosebumps along his arms. It’s 27 minutes to the devil’s hour, and he really doesn’t want to be awake right now, doesn’t want to be vulnerable to any sightings or spirits about to ruin his already turbulent night.
When he closes his eyes, a face with static crackling along the edges greets him, flickering through cmyk color scheme settings and then bursting into pieces. It bothers him. There is curiosity, yes, at what the face looks like. But there is also apprehension, bubbling in the silence and spilling over when he lowers his guard.
He takes a deep breath. Then with a push, he’s standing up and stumbling back to the bed, knees collapsing halfway through. A sigh worms its way out of his lips. Baekhyun clutches the edge of the mattress for leverage and clambers up, scattered blankets slipping down an inch closer to the ground. For a few minutes, he just sits there with a hand over his heart, waiting for it to resume its normal rhythm.
At first he thinks he’s just imagining things when the pool of moonlight forming a few feet away is disturbed by a flash of darkness. It’s a slight hint of motion, something that he’s probably conjured in the depths of his thoughts.
But then a silhouette settles right in front of the open windows, and Baekhyun’s never been all that brave -- he’s never believed in ghosts and horror stories, never -- and a whimper claws at his throat. He sits there, paralyzed, unable to comprehend anything. And then he’s diving under his blankets, his pillows; he piles them all up and buries himself underneath the weight of them.
The tolling of the grandfather clock drowns out his scream.
÷
For a few days, Baekhyun falls into dreamless pits and doesn’t see anymore silhouettes. It’s a small comfort. Still, anxiety crackles in his unconsciousness, and he’s on edge most of the time. Even his familiar ritual of stitching seams and the steady hum of the sewing machine can’t soothe him.
Baekhyun continues to keep the cabinet locked, dropping the keys on his desk but never inclined to use them. He’s uncovered the piano, though, coughing a little at the dust that rises when he shakes the crochet lace. It’s still in good working condition, singing do re mi underneath his fingertips. He puts off opening the cabinet for another day.
By now, the outfits he’s making are almost finished, scraps of fabric glistening beneath the fluorescent lights. Baekhyun envisions people wearing, his head filled with the sound of applause as his hand-picked models walk down the runway. Then a blush stains his neck and cheeks and he hides his face in his hands, trying to quell the pride churning acidic in his stomach. It’s too early for him to be this ambitious.
It’s a sticky Saturday morning, sweat trailing down skin and the house more stifling than usual, when Baekhyun decides to go down again to the beach. He finds his father walking on the shore, pant legs rolled up. Something about his expression tells Baekhyun that he’s lost in thought. But then he raises his head and spots Baekhyun, and he beckons him forward with a gesture of his hands, eyebrows knitting together.
“What are you doing here?” his father asks, sticking his hands in his pockets. Baekhyun thinks it’s been some time since the two of them have talked alone. His father’s not the demonstrative type, and Baekhyun almost never sees him until late in the evening, when work hours are over and self-respecting businessmen are making their way back to their homes.
“I was thinking of going for a swim,” he says, running his hand through his hair. The sand feels gritty between his toes. “It’s too hot inside the house.”
His father nods his head in agreement. They stand there, the seconds dripping between them in silence, and it’s more than a little awkward how neither of them have anything to say to each other. Baekhyun clears his throat in search of something to say, but his father beats him to it.
“How’s your project?”
Baekhyun stills. Aside from his mother who’s taken it upon herself to support her youngest son, no one’s ever bothered asking him about his course and what he does. His father’s never opposed his decision but the disapproval is there, echoing with every crinkle of the newspaper that he reads at breakfast. Baekhyun knows his father’s wanted a lawyer in the family, or a doctor, or an accountant. He and Baekbeom do a good job at not living up to his expectations.
“It’s -- It’s fine,” he manages to say around the sudden dryness of his vocal cords. “I’m nearly done with the outfits. I just…” He hesitates, trying to gauge his father’s expression before continuing. “I just need to see if they fit the models.”
“Are you happy with it?” his father asks.
“Of course,” Baekhyun rushes to say, “Of course I am. I used to think I wouldn’t be able to last, but I did, and I don’t think I want to do anything else.” In the periphery of his vision, he senses some kind of motion but Baekhyun dismisses it as just a bird flying past.
His father sighs. “Well, that’s that,” he says. “Nothing we can do if your heart’s set on something else.” He gives Baekhyun a smile bordering on tentative and unsure. “I’ll tell your grandmother to stop pushing you to do music.”
Baekhyun’s chest squeezes in on itself. “What?” he asks. The movement, he notices, is more distinct this time. His hands feel clammy. He refuses to acknowledge what he’s seeing.
“I know I haven’t really been supportive of you and your course choice,” his father says. “But I want you to know that I’d rather have you pursue something you really want than something you were forced to take for convenience.”
Baekhyun swallows. He’s just about to say something, but then the waves come crashing and he and his father scramble backward to avoid getting hit. And the words are still there on his tongue, but Baekhyun looks up and he’s choking them down, because the silhouette is just a stone’s throw away from him.
It’s suffused in the backlit glow coming from the sun, a dark, human-shaped speck. Yet Baekhyun can feel its gaze on him, trained on his face. His inhales are slow. There’s a tap on his shoulder but Baekhyun’s immobile, and he doesn’t know what to do, why is the silhouette here --
“Baekhyun?” A hand passes over his face and Baekhyun gives a start.
He turns to his father, voice still shaking as he says, “Yes?”
His father frowns at him. “Is there something wrong?”
“Nothing,” Baekhyun says. He looks back to where the silhouette had been, and he blinks. It’s gone. There is only sun and sea and surf staring back at him. “Nothing…” he says again, but this time it’s an empty echo. Had he imagined it?
“Are you sure?” his father asks, sounding concerned.
Baekhyun nods, not quite trusting himself to speak.
“I’ll go on ahead,” his father says, hand settling warm and heavy on Baekhyun’s shoulder for a second. “Don’t stay out here too late.”
He walks off, leaving Baekhyun to stare at the spot where the silhouette was just moments ago. Maybe, maybe he was just so stressed that he’d started seeing things. With a sigh, he walks toward the edges of the shore and dives in, the water erasing bits and pieces of heat from his skin. The taste of salt rests on his tongue.
When he swims back to the surface and raises his head, he sees it. The silhouette is back, and it’s too far for him to make out what it looks like, but it’s sitting on the sand and Baekhyun knows it’s watching him.
He swallows and dives back into the water.
÷
“You didn’t practice at all.”
It’s only the two of them inside the room, Baekhyun hovering at the foot of the bed while his grandmother’s gaunt face peers at him amidst the blankets piled on her. Her hair is loose, ends curling from all the braiding, and there is something like steel in her gaze. Baekhyun shifts from foot to foot.
“It would be better if you were more honest with me.”
He breathes in. “No,” he says, and listens to the way the word seems to shatter the tranquility of the room. “I didn’t.”
It’s strange how his grandmother doesn’t say anything to that, and yet disappointment slips in through the cracks in the walls. He can feel it settling, thick and viscous, in the very air between them. Baekhyun doesn’t like it, this feeling -- doesn’t like looking at his grandmother and finding only a certain blankness on her face.
“Well,” she says, and sighs. “I guess I was wrong. It can’t be helped that you’re not interested in music anymore. Perhaps you grew out of it a long time ago and I pretended not to notice.”
Baekhyun wants to tell her, No. He wants to say, I haven’t grown out of it at all. It’s still here, in my bones. But how to say those things, how to admit to them, when at the end of the day he’ll be more preoccupied with basting techniques than Chopin’s Nocturne in C sharp minor? He feels like he’s holding a tangled skein of yarn in his hands, desperately trying to pick apart the strands and only ending up making more knots.
“I don’t want to force you,” she says. “I never wanted to. It is simply that I saw potential in you, and talent. And, for a time, I thought you loved music as much as I did -- as I do -- and that was true. Now, I don’t think it is anymore.”
Something heavy clambers up his rib cage. It is twice the weight of any emotion he’s ever encountered, and Baekhyun thinks it’s a lot like sadness. He doesn’t understand himself anymore. He doesn’t know what he wants.
He opens his mouth to speak then stops.
Leaning against the headboard is the silhouette, obscured in the shadows and carrying an aura of judgment. He glances at his grandmother, wondering if she’s noticed it, if he must point it out to her. But the silhouette begins moving, and Baekhyun watches in horror as it brings a finger up to its lips. He shudders.
“Baekhyun? Are you listening to me?”
It takes him a lot of effort to stay in his place and not bolt out of the door. “Yes,” he says, hoping the silhouette will disappear.
His grandmother frowns. “You’re acting very odd today,” she says.
Baekhyun holds back the urge to say, You’d be acting very odd, too, if you could see that thing following me! He doesn’t want to draw more attention than he has to. He’ll just be pegged as insane and off his rocker.
“I’m fine,” he says. “I -- grandma --”
She holds up a hand. “I’m not expecting you to continue playing the piano if you don’t want to,” she says, and the silhouette is coming near, and Baekhyun is panicking. “But maybe you can make it a hobby? Don’t let the tradition die, Baekhyun. This family has always had a musician.”
Something about her tone unsettles him. It makes him think of his monochromatic dreams, of sheets consumed into ashes and enormous performance halls and the faint melody lying beneath. His mother’s told him about this -- about her sister Sunyoung, who’d inherited the musical genes and now toured the world with an orchestra. Always someone in the family, Baekhyun, he remembers her whispering in his ear after his piano tutor left. I guess, for this generation, it is you.
The silhouette tilts his head, as if knowing what he is thinking.
“I’ll think about it,” he says, fingers digging into his palms. “I’ll try to get in an hour or so of practice when I can.”
“That is a compromise, then,” his grandmother says, pursing her lips. “Very well, Baekhyunnie. I hope you play the death march during my funeral.”
Baekhyun steps back, the statement a slap on his face. “Grandmother --”
She laughs, and Baekhyun must be imagining it but the silhouette is curled around her now, sinking into her blankets and draping itself on her skin. “I’m only kidding, dear boy,” she says, although her mirth is less real and more artificial than Baekhyun’s ever seen.
She’s not kidding at all, and both of them know it. The truth is a subtle little thing, darting back and forth between them, but it’s there. He looks at her and sees an old woman holding on to the fraying strings of life keeping her together.
He looks at her, and he sees how much she’s wanted to let go a long time ago.
Baekhyun takes a step back. “Alright then, grandmother,” he says, keeping his voice as steady as possible. “I’ll be going now.”
When he takes one last glimpse, he sees the silhouette perched on the seat by his grandmother’s bedside, no longer watching him.
÷
It feels more like a memory than a dream this time. He’s back in their family’s house, sitting at his desk with an armload of fabrics and a sewing machine. There are pins scattered throughout the surface. Thread winds round his wrist, and measuring tape hangs from his neck, and feathers nest in his hair.
He sits back, allowing the velvet to spill into his lap as he cuts out the patterns for the dress he’s making. The clock ticks the seconds away in a corner of his room. It’s warm despite the presence of an air conditioning unit, the cold coming in short intervals that dissipate all too easily in the humidity.
The sound of the phone ringing creeps in through the cracks in the doorframe. He sighs and sets down the velvet, taking care to place the needle and pins inside the kit so they won’t roll down to the floor. Three rings now. He pushes back the chair and turns around.
There, sitting on the bed, is the same static figure. Except right now it’s not so static, every detail sharpened to the nth degree, and it takes all of his willpower to hold his ground. Because the figure is turning its head, and he wants to know what it looks like so, so bad. He wants but he’s scared, and his hands are clenched.
Staring back at him is a face he’s lived with for 20 years. The slanted, small eyes, the slightly wide nose, the thin pink lips with the mole on the upper right corner. Shock runs through his veins. He knows what he’s looking at. He knows this face, has known it for a long time.
It’s the same face he sees in the mirror every day, when he’s rimming his eyes with eyeliner; every night, when he’s about to go to bed and trying to gauge how bad his skin is. It’s facing him down, and the figure is dressed in white longsleeves, a black vest, black slacks and black leather shoes. He looks down at his own pajamas.
For the first time, the figure speaks:
“Hello, Baekhyunnie.”
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