reverberations [tertiary]
[BEFORE] [MASTERLIST]
- TERTIARY
Jiho is the last to leave the festival hall, feet seeming stuck in place and heart- heart long gone.
He only leaves when the servants begin to come in to clear away the mats on the floor and empty the braziers that have long since filled with ash. Shaking his head, he looks around and realizes that everyone else is gone.
He bursts into the corridor outside of the festival hall, where his attendant waits, kneeling still.
“Come, come,” he importunes, taking off down the corridor without looking back to see if he’s being followed. He’s a high ranking bureaucrat, he knows he’s always followed. His skin is running with energy and he wants to yell, wants to go back in time and kneel on the floor and let the performance restart and the notes to fill his ears again. He wishes he still had his heart to lose to it again.
Servants open the door to the outside and he barely has time to sit down and have his shoes put on him before he starts striding across the courtyard. Crisp autumn air bites at his nose and the tips of his fingers, but there’s too much excitement, too much elation to care.
He strides across the length of the courtyard and spins around to walk back. His head is still ringing with the memory of the notes sung, deeper than the trills of birds and richer than the sounds of the gayageum.
“Astounding,” he declares to the world, uncaring of the servants crossing at the edges of the courtyard. He thinks he’ll be hearing those songs in his head for years to come, and yet he knows it won’t be enough. He spins around when he reaches the edge of the courtyard again, blue silk robes flapping against his legs. “Wasn’t that amazing? I know you were listening, don’t lie.”
His attendant is standing a respectful distance away, hands tucked into his sleeves. “Very well done,” he demurs.
Jiho scoffs, waving his hand, though he knows it’s high praise from his quiet manservant. “‘Well done.’ You make it sound like food! So ordinary. But that- that was beautiful.” Jiho walks in a circle around the edge of the courtyard, letting the corners box him in as he follows the line of the buildings, agitated, trying to figure a way around this.
A thought strikes him and he turns back, pointing to his manservant. “You must find me his name, so I may write to him.”
His attendant doesn’t speak for a moment, lips pressed together in thought. He must see a flaw in Jiho’s plan, and Jiho stops and looks over at him. “So? Cannot it be done?” he demands, a little more sharply than he intends.
“Yes,” his attendant replies slowly, brow wrinkling. “But-,” he starts, then stops, shaking his head. He raises one hand to his lips, indicating a secret, and Jiho huffs. He’s too cautious sometimes, his attendant, but he ducks under the bridge connecting two of the buildings and sets off towards his quarters just the same.
He cuts around the gravel footpath, hearing the steady footsteps of his manservant behind him. He wishes he had the skill to write down the notes he had heard, or at least read them and understand, so he could remember perfectly again the songs of tonight. But that was a different kind of women’s domain, music, not his. And a few select men, those singers whose voices were not broken and could reach those lovely heights, and those who had been trained since birth to play the instruments to match such a voice.
Jiho growls, low in his throat. All of his political training, all of the annals he’s read, and it all seems like nothing compared to that music. He feels useless and yet freed, as if the performance struck away his old self and left only the core left, the most vital part of his soul and he’s realized that’s all that matters.
“But?” he asks, when they’ve reached the familiar stone walls that surround his quarters. He pushes open the gate himself and steps through into the small courtyard, turning straight towards his study. He has the sudden urge to burn all of his scrolls and the books piled around the small room. They seem so useless now.
“The king brought him in, master.”
Jiho waves his hand at this, dropping his shoes off and walking into his study. “I’m just going to write to him to express my admiration, nothing else.”
His attendant remains quiet until Jiho has settled himself on the floor in front of his desk and pulled out a roll of parchment.
“Master,” he says, quiet and cautioning. Jiho can’t look at him, doesn’t want to see the worry that’s surely scrawled across his already lined forehead. “I know your intentions are good, but you know the king. You know how he is.”
Jiho frowns, digging his fingernails into the palm of his hand for a moment before consciously unclenching his hand. “Yes, I know my cousin very well.”
There’s a long silence from behind him that notches up the tension in Jiho’s spine. “You know he doesn’t share.”
Jiho’s mouth tightens, annoyed at the implication even though he understands the intent. “I don’t share his tastes in bed, merely in music. This time, at least. Who knows where he found that horrible foreign singer at the last concert,” he scoffs. Despite his words, something a little like fear and a little like a challenge spark up in his heart. “Now, find me that name.”
With a short, silent bow that seems disbelieving, knowing his attendant for as long as Jiho has, the man departs.
-
A week later, Jiho is still staring at a blank sheet of paper, mind swirling. How to begin? He’s normally so verbose, but this small task has tied his mind up for the past week.
Your performance was- so trite, he thinks, and discards the thought. He’s been thinking about this all week but he hasn’t been able to come up with the right words, and he hasn’t been able to do any work, either. Requests come to his door every hour for work to be done, plans to be made or laws to be checked, and Jiho has ignored them all.
Thank you for- no. He slides backwards until he’s lying on his back in the middle of his study. He closes his eyes, and again the song picks up in his ears, like he’s still in the festival hall and that man is singing, voice clear. His heart swells until it presses pain into his chest, but it’s a sweet ache, even now.
Finally, he sits up and picks up his brush to draw the first strokes.
Every morning I’ve woken to the echoes of your voice and for once I don’t regret waking at the rise of dawn, if it means I can revisit the memory of your performance. But my memory is already losing bits of your song and dawn is drawing darker every day because of it. When do you next perform?
He sends the carefully rolled note with his manservant around noon, some foreign feeling in his chest. He can’t tell if it’s the challenge of messaging of the king’s favorite singer, or merely anticipation of the response.
It’s not the chaste note he knows his manservant wants him to send, but it’s a mere letter. They’ve never even come close enough to let Jiho see his veiled face, let alone touch. There’s no danger here.
-
The response comes two days later, wrapped in simple white string. His manservant hands over the letter and disappears, closing the door of the study behind him. Somehow, waiting for a response has made it even more impossible to do work. Jiho can’t concentrate on anything, and has told his servants to tell the others that he’s ill and unable to take requests at the moment.
He unfurls the letter, surprised to see the characters drawn so precisely. They’re almost like children’s, the way they curl in on themselves in dark curves drawn without the careless precision of the bureaucratic elite, but they’re endearing just the same. Somehow, he knows they’re Jaehyo’s words, scrawled across the paper in his own hand.
When he begins to read, he hears the words in Jaehyo’s voice.
I’m sorry to have been the reason for your waking before dawn. I hear the sunrise is often beautiful, though I am rarely awake for it. I think, perhaps, that the reason it grows darker is more for the winter coming than because of my voice. If I could sing the sun into shining, it would be summer too long just so I could lie in the warmth of its days, and yet autumn is nearly past. As always, I sing at the king’s request.
There’s a long, elegant signature that Jiho can barely read, but he doesn’t mind. He wants to laugh at the return note, just the slightest hint of edge to the words, telling Jiho he doesn’t want to be addressed like a woman he is trying to woo, not that he has had much experience doing that. But there’s something else, an undertone of flirtation that arches down Jiho’s spine and sends him scrambling to reply.
It is my own mind that wakes me with remnants of your voice, so there is no need to apologize. The sunrise is beautiful if one is prepared for it, even alone, but it is the company to a sunrise that lifts it beyond all other times. It is when the dreams of the night can mix with the softness of the new day, and all the possibilities of the world lie in front of one. If you could sing the sun into shining, perhaps I would ask you to sing the sunrise into being for longer, draw the dawn out so you could see its beauty.
He doesn’t allow himself to think too deeply about the words that are coming from his brush. If he stops to think, he won’t write them, and then whatever comes out afterwards, overthought, might as well be a lie.
The response comes so quickly afterwards that Jiho is surprised. It’s been barely a day, which means that Jaehyo must be in the palace or somewhere close by in Hanyang. The thought quickens Jiho’s pulse, sends goosebumps skittering across his skin just as much as the words that he reads in Jaehyo’s low, sweet voice.
You would ask me to sing the sunrise for you? A tricky skill. You make it sound beautiful but I am hard to wake. You would spend more time attempting to wake me then admiring the lightening sky, which I could not abide. Perhaps I am not the right companion for your morning hours, and you should find a songbird instead. They rise so easily and their voices are much sweeter than mine could ever be.
Jiho rushes off the next letter without thinking about what he’s writing. His heartbeat is thick in his throat at the words, the demur in Jaehyo’s writing that seems at odd with his skill. He wants, more than anything, to let his praise reach Jaehyo’s heart.
It would be better, then, to keep you awake all night before the dawn, if only to make sure you could see it with me. I rarely keep company until the dawn hours and a songbird would be a pale comparison to your sweet voice. The enjoyment of your smart company would surely sharpen the pleasure of the sun’s rise. Please, let me extend the invitation for your accompaniment one morning so we may watch the sunrise together, even if it might be far in the future.
The idea of Jaehyo in his rooms, seated across the table from him as the dawn lightens the rice paper in the preparation for the morning, sets something aflame in Jiho. It would be so easy to reach across the table and touch his face or his cool, soft fingertips. Jiho swallows, trying to ignore the way his heart picks up at the idea. He rolls up the scroll tightly and knots the tie around it, hoping that none of his urgency comes across in the words drawn across the fine paper, afraid of what it might mean, for both him and the singer he writes to.
The returning letter, when it comes, however, is quite chaste.
I would be honored to take breakfast with you, though I don’t see what pleasure you could have in my long-risen self. Even those that know me laugh at my sleepy face, and though I might be able to open my eyes for your sunrise, I doubt I could give it the true greeting that it needs.
A smile presses at the corners of Jiho’s lips at the thought of Jaehyo’s messy hair and sleep-puffy face, leaning on the table as they wait for breakfast, the doors to the outside thrown open. He wonders what it would be like if Jaehyo came to visit his family’s house in the mountains to the north of Hanyang, where the morning air is crisp before the sunrise and the rising sun pulls the soft smell of loam from the earth as it strikes out over the trees.
Just your presence would be greeting enough. I cannot promise not to laugh, but if we are both to stay awake until an early hour, you will have the chance to laugh at my own long-woken expression, so perhaps it would be a fair trade.
Jiho takes a deep breath, aware of how his heart is beating triple time against his chest. He doesn’t understand the ache of want that trembles underneath his skin, or why it can no longer be completely soothed by words alone.
-
The letters come daily, twice daily, up to three times a day, run back and forth between Jaehyo’s rooms and the section of the palace that Jiho lives in by Jiho’s quiet attendant, or one of the discreet men who serve Jaehyo. He should be working, but the missives he’s given by the officials no longer interest him.
He knows there is talk spreading through the palace and among the men he works with, rumors of his sudden disappearance from court life. His attendant tells him what the other servants are whispering to each other, what they overhear their masters and mistresses speaking about through the paper-thin doors or while they serve them their food.
“This is dangerous,” his attendant warns him, more than once, as he takes the tightly-rolled scroll from Jiho’s hand. As if Jiho were not aware of what he’s doing, and how closely he treads to the edges of the king’s favor granted by their familial relation. Perhaps he would be more careful if Jaehyo, too, had not disappeared from court life as quickly as he had entered it, though his disappearance is far less suspicious than Jiho’s. Perhaps he would be more careful if there were not a palpable thread of connection between Jaehyo’s words and Jiho’s fingers, if his heart didn’t speed when his attendant returned with a new letter.
Instead, what he writes becomes more and more personal as the days pass and the awkward, formal tone of the first letters bleeds into something more flirtatious, bolder. Jiho knows he shouldn’t be doing this, shouldn’t respond to the bite of the words behind the ink, the way they ask for something a little on the edge of dangerous, but he cannot find it within himself to stop. The more that Jaehyo writes back to him, the more the ache under his heart grows. He wants to see Jaehyo in person, wants him across the table as the sun rises or tucked up under his arm, or just within hands reach, if only for an hour.
So one night, when the dark of the early hours begins to bleed into the soft, dove grey of dawn, he draws his brush into the characters that he’s wanted to write since that first day.
I know that this is forward of me to ask, despite our many letters, but I wonder if you would do me the honor of visiting me one morning in the coming week. I will not ask you to sing, but merely watch the rise of the sun with me.
-
It’s not as easy as he wants it to be. Less than a month after their correspondence begins, two days before they’re set to meet, a letter comes from his older brother, foreboding words scrawled hastily across the thick paper.
Father is sick and we do not have much time before he passes. Mother requests that you return home as soon as possible.
Jiho barely has the presence of mind to quickly write out a letter to Jaehyo, explaining his confusion and dread, before a million other tasks come to the fore and he has no time, even for sleep.
In the rush of preparation for his departure, Jaehyo’s returning letter is nearly lost. His attendant only hands him the scroll when they’ve packed everything necessary onto a cart and Jiho has mounted his horse.
It’s only been one day. It’s possible that Jiho could wait one more and have his morning with Jaehyo, but they have no time to spare. His brother rarely writes to him, and is never dramatic. If he says they have little time, they have possibly less.
Jiho unrolls the paper as the horse trots forward, led by a groom. The words are hastily written as well and smudged against the back of the paper, as if Jaehyo had forgotten to dry the ink with sand before he sent it off, rushed as he was.
I’m sorry to hear about your father and of your abrupt departure. Do not worry about our plans. There are many mornings yet to come that we may spend together, and only one father that you can lose. If you need me, I am always here.
In the light of the morning sun, he takes the words for a temporary replacement for Jaehyo, just this once.
They’ll meet soon, he knows.
-
His father, though, is very ill. He is barely conscious by the time that Jiho makes it back to the family home days later. None of the doctors can do much more than stifle the pain that’s crippling him, and as much as Jiho wants to rage against them at the unfairness of it all, he has no energy for it.
Grief shutters his emotions when his father passes only a few days later. It’s impossible for him to eat or sleep, despite he and his father’s tenuous relationship for years before.
He tries to think of what to write to Jaehyo, how to share his burden, but the words won’t come for weeks yet. They seem locked away inside of him, wherever his tears have decided to hide as well. When they do come, it is as though a dam has broken and he spends hours writing, half-blind with a grief he hasn’t allowed himself to feel unless he can share it with Jaehyo.
Jaehyo writes back almost immediately, the familiar curls of his handwriting an incomparable balm. Now, more than ever, does Jiho wish they had the chance to meet in person. Just the memory of Jaehyo’s voice so close or the touch of his hand, might be enough to soothe the ache in his heart that seems fathomless in the wake of his father’s death.
The only way he can get through it is the idea that soon, he’ll return to Hanyang, to those hastily-abandoned rooms. Soon, he’ll return to Jaehyo.
But the details of his father’s death take longer than he thinks to resolve. Debts, some impossibly large, become clear when Jiho and his brother begin to dig through their father’s papers. Debt collectors come by the family home, aware of their loss but more afraid of the default on the loans.
Jiho is forced to put off his return to Hanyang indefinitely.
Jaehyo, when he responds, is sympathetic. Do not worry, he writes, the characters shaken with something that Jiho hopes is disappointment, or even grief, something similar to the heavy feeling in his own heart. I will be here when you return, and the sun continues to rise every morning.
Under the words there lies an echo of Jiho’s own thoughts, there is still time.
Even pooling the family’s resources, it becomes clear something more has to be done to clear the debts. His mother writes to her wealthy friends and extended family, announcing the intention of her sons to marry. She sells some of her jewelry, trinkets their father brought back from his trips to Ming and the mountains beyond. He can’t tell if she’s sad to lose them or glad to be rid of the memories attached, and the disappointment his father’s name brings up now.
Jiho marries in the summer of the next year, to a girl from a wealthy family in a southern province. She’s smart and leads their family from the background, keeping things running while Jiho tries to focus on his work. She and Jiho’s mother become good friends, close despite their age difference, closer than even Jiho is with her.
Jiho loves her, in a vague way that isn’t entirely duty, but isn’t much of anything else. Letters between him and Jaehyo lessen as time passes, as they must. Jaehyo congratulates him on his marriage in a short letter that Jiho crumples in his hands when he reads it for the first time, heart caught up in something close to grief that he can’t explain. He wishes for something he can’t put to words, for time that he doesn’t have, or a life that he no longer leads.
Jaehyo tells him that he’s left the capitol, gone back to his home near the southern sea. It takes longer and longer for their letters to reach each other, though the half-ache, half-excitement that pulls at Jiho’s heart every time his attendant appears at the door to his study with a familiar scroll of paper, never quite fades.
Jiho has a ‘happy life,’ though he always feels as though there’s something missing. He and his wife have a daughter, then a son. Jiho teaches them both their characters, aware he’s not supposed to teach his daughter anything but unable to deny her pleading face.
He hires a music tutor for them both, and his daughter develops a beautiful voice. He tries to enjoy it but there is a bitterness it unlocks in him, despite her sweet tone. Each day, at the hour that she practices, Jiho leaves for long walks into the mountains that encircle the house, sometimes not returning until the sun has long set. His wife never asks about the strange, long absences, only turns her face away when he returns, as if she knows.
Sometimes he wakes inexplicably in the night, wishing he could cross the country to Jaehyo’s side. He has an overwhelming desire to cross over the mountains until the southern sea rises into view; that odd, blue expanse fading into a shore he has never seen.
He dreams of the house Jaehyo has, with its sloping roof and the rooster that Jaehyo laughingly writes as being the bane of his sleeping schedule. He’ll push open the door of the yard and step over the wooden threshold, dawn fading the dark edges of the wood and making the dew on the patterned roof tiles glow. And standing in the doorway, robes slipping down his shoulders, is- the dream stutters and falls apart there, as always.
Perhaps Jaehyo has changed in the years between, has lost his voice, but he will never know.
- ONE
Years seem to pass between them in the mess of sleep. Centuries slip by, one right after another, winter snows blanketing each new year, letting the soft moonlight hide time’s fingers digging into the landscape.
They don’t notice it like that, as it is, the inescapable degrade.
Whatever souls linger on the Earth longer than they should- those fair few ghosts still holding to the fallow earth, needing the feel of the pine boughs underfoot, the sharp smell of rain into a swollen creek, the cry of cities waking, those hearts still tied to the carnal beat of the world around them, or the wisp of each other- they have overstayed.
They grow weak as the nights cycle on. They are clinging where they should not be. They are holding onto those things, those words, those betrayals, those fellow hearts, when they should not. They should go on, but they know nothing else, now.
He doesn’t notice it like that. His name changes with the rise and fall of the season’s breath. Transience doesn’t become him, doesn’t become anyone, but nor does it seem to degrade him, not like the others. He doesn’t even remember why he’s here, why he’s still holding on.
In between those slips of life, he doesn’t know where he goes, except into the dark. He doesn’t remember more. He doesn’t know who controls these things, when he wakes into life and when he disappears into a sleep like death, if these things can even be controlled.
Maybe they’re all just dreams and he’s just lost in them.
Sometimes, an exhaustion he could have only collected over a hundred lifetimes pins him. For a moment he seems to recognize the days he’s risen for, and it weighs too much. Then he shakes his head, blinks, and all he can see is this one life.
In truth, he’s forgotten that he’s waiting.
-
That guy- Ahn Jaehyo, Jiho learns- is, in fact, added to their little group. It’s been faltering ever since Minho had been forced to drop out and Jiseok had switched companies; it’s just him and Kyung and Kim Yukwon, and Jiho doesn’t know how to feel.
Jiho doesn’t like him- hates the way his stomach drops when Jaehyo looks over at him, the way he feels himself tense up for a fight whenever Jaehyo smiles at someone else, the way Jiho has to waddle to the bathroom in the middle of the night when his thoughts won’t stop buzzing in his head and he can hear Jaehyo’s sleepy breaths from across the room and his exhausted brain wonders what it would be like to curl up next to him, have those long, hot fingers slip down his shorts and suddenly he’s hard and there are six guys in a room with him and no room to jerk off in peace.
Jiho has gotten really bored of seeing the tiled walls of the bathroom at 3AM, but he can’t sleep, either. He has odd dreams that break up his exhaustion but splinter in the faded light of the dawn, until they’re broken down past comprehension. So many mornings, he wakes up feeling as though he’s been running the whole night, that he’s traveled through cities hot with ash or climbed up mountains as rain splatters down between the winter-bare branches, always going towards someone, or running away from a voice, but never able to rest.
They’re all tired, all the growing collection that will one day be Blockbuster, but he seems to be the only one who has trouble falling asleep.
He antagonizes Jaehyo, he knows. But Jaehyo gives back as good as he gets, those wide eyes narrowing to slits every time he sees Kyung and Jiho laughing in a corner together, as if he knows it’s about him. And Jiho watches for those signs, feels electricity lance down his spine and heat spread over his chest when Jaehyo clenches his jaw or lets those dark eyes flash. What a pale substitute for desire, anger is, but it’s all Jiho will allow himself.
There are things he wants, and things he knows he can allow himself, and he knows where the thin line is drawn for idols. He knows where he’s drawn the line for himself, steps further back than anyone, because he knows himself. He knows his mind. If he lets himself get one thing he wants, he won’t stop before he’s gotten the rest and there’s not enough leeway in this life for the choices he wants to make, the people he wants, not for anyone in their country.
He won’t get caught up in these little things, not when there are six other guys looking at him, calling him ‘Leader’ and knowing he can’t fail them, not for something like this. He can’t let himself, not when there’s this much at stake.
At night, Jiho curls around that hot flicker of anger in his heart, knowing it’s already beginning to twist into something else, something softer, and presses his fingertips to his chest, telling himself, Not in this life. He falls asleep to the words circling around his mind, a mantra that has lost all meaning in repetition.
Not in this life. Not now.
[FORWARD]