timeshaker; 2/2
When Jo Mi returns to the apartment, Kyuhyun isn’t there to greet him at the door. Moonlight flits through the windows and sends his shadow scurrying across dark shapes as he stalks out room after room in search of Kyuhyun. The slow throb at the back of his head threatens to burst into anger when he reaches the kitchen and finds Kyuhyun huddled at the corner of the sink. His hands are holding his head, those piteous cries barely audible. Jo Mi stands and watches, not trusting himself to move. A gasp rips through the stoic air. Kyuhyun looks up and tears catch the light of the moon.
“It’s true, isn’t it,” he says, voice strangely calm and serene. “That’s why you didn’t want to come back.”
That pulls the trigger. Jo Mi feels his fury comes unleashed.
“Why are you still here?”
There’s a loud crash when Jo Mi drags Kyuhyun up and slams him against the fridge. Before Kyuhyun can cry out, Jo Mi seals his lips with his own. The kiss is brutal. Kyuhyun refuses to open his mouth so Jo Mi forcibly cranks it open by pinching his jaw so hard, Kyuhyun thought it’s going to break. As Jo Mi’s tongue sweeps into Kyuhyun’s mouth, he feels those hands at his shoulders, trying frantically to push him away. Breaking the kiss, Jo Mi leans in closer to hiss in Kyuhyun’s face.
“Why do you think I’m still here? I thought you said you’ll do anything.”
All of Kyuhyun’s struggles die at his cruel words. Jo Mi peers into Kyuhun’s eyes. He can’t tell if that’s hope or hurt lurking in there, can’t tell if he’s breaking Kyuhyun or himself.
“I’m sorry,” he says because there’s nothing else to be said. He tries to put his arms around Kyuhyun but ends up pushing himself away from him instead. Kyuhyun slides slowly to the floor. He doesn’t make a sound. It makes Jo Mi wants to cry himself. He really doesn’t think he has a choice anymore. No one is going to help him with his questions. The realization made him so angry earlier.
Jo Mi's fingers close into a fist and resignation bleeds out from it, clotting into a single helpless word.
“Sorry.”
★
They don’t speak again until a call from Kyuhyun’s sister comes at 11:43am the following morning. Kyuhyun puts the call on loudspeaker. Ara is asking him to help her pick her daughter up from school. Kyuhyun looks fearfully at Jo Mi who nods. He agrees and they hang up.
“You won’t be able to avoid it anyway,” Jo Mi smiles reassuringly. “It is bound to happen.” A shiver runs through Kyuhyun and Jo Mi pulls him closer. “At 2:15pm, you will drive through Samcheongdong and knocks down a girl named Kim Heejing. She dies on the spot,” he reads off the copy of Tomorrow’s History he printed last evening. There’s a death grip on his arm. He strokes Kyuhyun’s back in a comforting manner, his fingers taper to the bumps of his spine and magic away the fear coiled in it. “Don’t worry, you have me.”
Kyuhyun turns to look at him. He still hasn’t said anything but there’s trust in the way his hand lays over Jo Mi’s. There’s trust despite all these inexplicable things happening to them, despite being trapped in a whirlwind they can’t claw their way out of. And then there’s last night.
Jo Mi is rarely honest to himself but he’s also a terribly untalented liar. He knows it’s because Kyuhyun doesn’t really have a choice too. But that doesn’t matter anymore. Jo Mi believes everything is worth it.
He stretches this moment into infinity.
★
“There are two conditions to make Notable Incidents possible. Firstly, you need to be in the Right Place. This is a constant because it’s controlled by Fate,” Jo Mi explains to Kyuhyun in the car. “So the place is always right. Fate makes extraordinary things happen.”
“Is Fate from your organization too?” Kyuhyun makes a turn at the ice cream parlor. “Latest Flavor! Pineapple Tart♥!“ says the stand board in front of it. They are nearing Samcheongdong.
Barking a laugh, Jo Mi replies, “Nay, no one has the nerve to tell Fate what to do. She is her own CEO.” He takes a moment to sober. “The second requisite is the Right Timing. A Notable Incident is slated to happen in the right place at the right time. Without either, it will not occur.”
The time on the dashboard is a blinking green 2:12pm. Kyuhyun’s knuckles are tight on the wheel. They enter Samcheongdong. The first ten meters is peaceful and the anticipation almost kills Kyuhyun. But then out of nowhere, a school boy dashes across the road in pursuit of his soccer ball. Kyuhyun is prepared, his foot goes automatically for the brakes but in a fit of agitation, he hits the accelerator instead. The car reacts immediately by speeding ahead. It crashes into a cart hawking handmade accessories and sends beads flying across the road, rainbow lights scattering in all directions as they refract sunbeams.
In contrast to Kyuhyun’s terror, Jo Mi is a picture of calm. Unperturbed, he takes out Molly II and is about to press the silver button on her when the bakery comes into sight. Horror, uninvited and suddenly overwhelming, sweeps over him, however, when he looks up and sees the donut girl standing just ten feet away from their car. She doesn’t even have time to turn her back. Jo Mi recognizes the red ribbon perched on the top of her head. Vertigo robs his breath. There’s a queer whirring sound, it drowns out everything but Kyuhyun’s voice.
“Jo Mi!” he screams, smashing his reverie, spurring him into action.
His thumb has just grazed the button when he drops Molly II. He lets out an involuntary frenzied shout. There isn’t enough time to unbuckle and dive under the seat for her.
“We’re going to cra-“ Kyuhyun’s scream dies in his throat, he braces himself for impact.
Jo Mi’s foot nudges Molly II on the floor. He takes a careless aim and steps down on her, praying reverently that he hits the right button. The glass of her face cracks under pressure, the sound crisp and distinct despite the chaos surrounding him. There’s a loud bang, tremendous force threatening to evict him from his seat and Jo Mi knows the front of the car is no more. The seatbelt catches him and he couldn’t breathe for a while as the forces squeezes the air from his lungs. It takes Jo Mi a long while to recover from his coughing fit and when he does, he registers darkness and the lack of motion. Blinking his eyes open, he sees an astonished Kyuhyun at his side. There’s a large red spot on his forehead that will no doubt develop into a bruise and cuts on his arms, but otherwise, he seems fine. There’s an expanse of white before them. They have driven the car into the wall.
For some time, all Kyuhyun can do is to blink and shake his head. Eventually he says, “We, I-we hit the wall. She was there, I was so sure….but it was as if the wall moved and we hit that instead.”
There’s a series of rapid knocks on Jo Mi’s window. It’s the donut girl asking them if they were fine. Jo Mi unbuckles himself and slumps in his seat to rest. Then he recalls and bolts upright to retrieve Molly II from the floor. She used to be scarred but her face is now disfigured beyond repair. The half of her face with the silver button is smashed in. But Jo Mi can still read the time off her. It is now 2:42pm. He rubs his thumb wistfully over the silver button. The open hand is tightened into a fist in the emblem engraved on it, ensnaring the numbers within its hold.
He has shifted time forward.
Donut girl is rapping on the window again. He turns his head tiredly to face her and feels his jaw goes slack.
“Gotcha~” Heechul sings.
★
Jo Mi is forced to leave Kyuhyun behind at the scene and go off with Heechul.
“No,” he wrenches his arm away from Heechul’s grip, “I have to-“
The hold turns vise-like. “Do you think you still have room to negotiate with me, Jo Mi?” Heechul gently warns.
‘He knows,’ Jo Mi realizes. The panic in him surrenders. “What’s going to happen now?”
“First of all, you’ll have to be locked up. And just so you know, no one messes with Molly. You shouldn't have tried to delete that email. She's such a tattle teller.”
★
Ryeowook visits him the next day. “How are you,” he says nervously.
“Fine,” Jo Mi replies automatically even though his expression relates a different story. He’s locked in the basement of their office building. There are rooms in here for locking up people who’re suspected of committing Time crimes. There’s only a bed in the room. Ryeowook stands awkwardly in the far corner of the room, the corners of his lips set stubbornly down. “It wasn’t your fault,” Jo Mi says briskly, he has little capacity to console others now. “The crime has already been committed even before our talk. What happened yesterday was my own decision.” Then his brows wrinkle in thought. “But I don’t understand why my future self sent the email to Kyuhyun.”
“You don’t understand because you’ve changed History.”
Both of them jolt at Heechul’s voice. “Leave,” Heechul commands Ryeowook who departs after a tiny nod directed at Jo Mi.
Heechul doesn’t wait for Jo Mi to ask him to continue. “The original History goes something like this.”
26 March 2012
They met at the Time Travel Convention. Kyuhyun was an associate professor who specialized in quantum physics. Jo Mi was a Timeshaker, present at the convention only to make sure no one succeeded in unraveling the secrets behind Time Travel. But of course that wasn’t what it said on his name card. There was an excellent book on quantum mechanics that Jo Mi thought Kyuhyun shouldn’t miss out on and Kyuhyun found no reason to disagree on that. They arranged to meet the following night.
31 March 2012
Things were moving much too fast (299,792,458 m/s, to be exact) for Kyuhyun’s liking. He told Jo Mi that. But Jo Mi only laughed and said, “It’s OK, you’re the right one.” When Kyuhyun expressed his doubts by pursing his lips, he added, “Trust me, I know. We’re written. In the stars, if you’re sappy enough.” Again, Jo Mi convinced Kyuhyun easily. Or maybe this was just beyond logic.
2 April 2012
Jo Mi ignored Kyuhyun’s call. All sixteen of them. He took a day off, rejected reality and crawled into his blankets. But late that night, he made a call to Ryeowook and woke him up with a seemingly innocent question.
3 April 2012
Jo Mi sent an email to Kyuhyun. He set the arrival date to 22 February 2012, thereby altering a tiny part in the vast spectrum of History and changing his life in a way he didn’t think was possible.
Threads of disbelief run through Jo Mi. “No, no, that couldn’t be,” he latches onto the loophole in Heechul’s story “Why did I send the email to Kyuhyun? That’s too much effort. It doesn’t make sense. I could have sent it to myself and still be able to stop the accident.”
When Heechul answers, his features soften into a look of pity. Jo Mi flinches instinctively. “Because you were still hoping to meet and fall in love with him.”
Jo Mi is quiet now. Too quiet. Heechul hears himself draw and disperse air. When Jo Mi finally starts talking, Heechul has to lean forward to capture his words. “That’s why the email vanished after Kyuhyun read it? Because the future has changed? I won’t be around anymore?”
At Heechul’s silence, he repeats, “I won’t be around anymore, would I?”
Patting his shoulder, Heechul says, “We don’t move time forward for a reason, Jo Mi. Nothing can make up for Lost Time. But what you did wasn’t so terrible, was it?” His touch picks up the chill in Jo Mi’s bones. “I don’t think it was.”
He moves away and the official tone creeps back. “The gravity of your actions will be decided by the Time Keeper. Your hearing has been scheduled. It will be held on the 19th of April.”
★
The day before the trial, Ryeowook pays him a visit again.
Harsh, white lighting in Jo Mi’s cells highlights the lack of sunlight. Jo Mi sits at the head of the bed, his head tucked between bent knees, looking like he’s waiting to be picked up at the Lost & Found.
“He is looking for you,” Ryeowook mumbles, uncertainty blanketing his form. He isn’t sure he should be saying this.
His words dissolve the invisible binds holding Jo Mi together. “Is he alright?” he asks eagerly. Ryeowook is shocked to see vestiges of hope shimmering on his face. He turns resolutely away from it. “Look at yourself, Jo Mi! He landed you in this!”
But Jo Mi is beyond redemption. “What did he say? Tell me what he said, Ryeowook, Ryeowook,” Jo Mi means to grab Ryeowook’s arm but he misjudges his strength and pulls him down onto the bed instead. Startled, Ryeowook pushes Jo Mi away. At his rejection, a cry of desperation escapes from Jo Mi. “Please,” he begs. The word barges its way into Ryeowook’s heart and singes. This isn’t what he wants.
“Forget him, Jo Mi,” he pleas in return. But Jo Mi is blind to his good intentions.
“Please, Ryeowook. Ryeowook! Ryeowook!” His cries become frantic shouts when Ryeowook makes to stand. “Please, I beg you,” A tear collides with Ryeowook’s hand and sears him. He recoils. “Please…” Ryeowook chances a glance at Jo Mi. Tears are still carving crooked lines down his cheeks. He seizes the sleeve of Ryeowook’s shirt like it’s a life buoy. Ryeowook tries to make him let go, tries to pry loose his white fingers one by one. But Jo Mi gasps and chokes on his breath, hangs on a little harder, cries a little harder, if that’s even possible.
Ryeowook wonders if he knows how to be cruel.
Jo Mi is still begging. “Please… just, just tell me if I’ll see him again.”
★
Heechul tells him to prepare for trial. So Jo Mi cracks his head open and spills out his thoughts. Relentlessly, he relives each of them until he reaches the final piece. The last time he saw Kyuhyun, they had been in an accident. And that’s what they are. They are made up of collisions, sparks and broken parts.
Train wrecks.
★
6 months later
A figure approaches Ryeowook as he steps out of the office building. Ryeowook doesn’t pause, he widens his strides instead. “I told you not to come anymore, Kyuhyun, he’s not here. I’ve told you things I shouldn’t have but that’s about it.”
Kyuhyun maintains his silence. He has exhausted all his questions a few months ago, excavated disjointed facts from Ryeowook and patched them up into a jagged timeline. Then he took a far longer time to digest it. Now he’s only waiting for Ryeowook to loosen up and tell a different story.
The quiet irritates Ryeowook. He should be getting used to it already but no, his aggravation accumulates like magpies and their stolen trinkets. Without warning, he whirls around to glare at Kyuhyun. But Ryeowook brakes too suddenly for him, Kyuhyun walks right into him and he would have fell if Kyuhyun didn’t grab hold of him in time. “Are you OK?” he asks. “You shouldn’t stop all of a sudden. It’s dangerous.”
That breaks the hundredth mark on Ryeowook’s anger meter. He pushes Kyuhyun away. “You!” He jabs a finger in Kyuhyun’s chest and finds, to his intense chagrin, that he has to elevate his head to look at him. “Stop following me and stop being so tall!”
Kyuhyun doesn’t say a word. Ryeowook is about to call it a day and reserve artillery for tomorrow’s battle when Kyuhyun opens his mouth. “Please,” he whispers. The word floats in the still of the night, rises above background noise and shoots Ryeowook down from where he stands. ‘Please,’ Jo Mi had once begged him. Ryeowook attempts to walk away.
Kyuhyun is unmoving. “Please,” he repeats even as Ryeowook walks out on him. The wind carries the sound to Ryeowook’s ears. His reserve sunders and he accelerates every step until he breaks into a run.
★
Unexpectedly, Kyuhyun doesn’t appear the next day.
And the next.
Ryeowook discovers he is more aggravated by Kyuhyun’s absence than his presence. He tells this to Kyuhyun when he appears again in crutches. “I thought you died, turns out you only broke a foot.” Then his tone turns somber. “I thought you gave up.”
Kyuhyun smiles sadly.
“Why don’t you give up?” Ryeowook persists.
The smile disappears. “I never had the chance to tell him.”
“Tell him what?”
Kyuhyun drops his eyes and smiles again. Ryeowook really means to sigh; he lets out a tiny screech of frustration instead.
“Leave.”
“Tell me something good enough to make me leave.”
“Can’t you tell I’m about to!” Ryeowook snaps. ‘Hope is a terrible thing’, he muses bleakly when he sees excitement, mixed with something like pain, floods Kyuhyun’s face. He has seen that look before, the first time Kyuhyun came to find him, demanding to know Jo Mi’s whereabouts. And then he witnessed its sluggish death in passivity. He guesses he’d be angry on Jo Mi’s behalf if Kyuhyun weren’t able to hold out for him but then he won’t exactly blame Kyuhyun either.
Yet Kyuhyun waits.
“You’ll see him again. History hasn’t changed all that much. He belongs in your future.”
That’s the last thing Ryeowook said to Kyuhyun. They never met again.
★
Kyuhyun has envisioned many times before the way they would encounter again. In his fantasies, they chance upon each other like how the leads in a romantic comedy might. That way, they would also have a fair shoot at their own happy ending. He finds solace in the belief that their finale is still a thousand takes away. He wakes up to possibilities everyday and lives.
Time is a procrastinator and for a whole year, Kyuhyun has to learn how to surface above his anxiety by weaving daydreams. As it turns out, they reunite under perfectly ordinary circumstances; while they are browsing in a second hand CD shop. Instead of the wild joy he has fabricated so often in his imagination, all Kyuhyun experiences is a deep sense of loss. This is what he has once held but lost.
He wants to do so much but all he does is stare. His grief is so quiet, it feels like the world - with all its noise and colors - is going to drown it out. This thought scares him. The suffocating urge to scream presses in on his sanity, gushes through his blood and sends him sky high on panic. But when Kyuhyun opens his mouth, his name is the only thing he utters.
“Jo Mi.” It’s barely a whisper. “Jo Mi,” he says again, his volume too loud for a small, sparsely patronized shop.
Jo Mi looks confused for a while and it occurs to Kyuhyun that this might not be reality. Because sometimes make believe is so real that he talks to himself. The familiar sense of agonizing disappointment surges through him, although it’s not quite so intolerable anymore. But then Jo Mi emits a sound of understanding and says in halting Korean. “Ah!” he exhales in surprise, even though he really shouldn’t be. This is Seoul, even if they are currently in Chinatown. “You, Korean? I no speak Korean.” He turns to leave.
“No!” On reflex, Kyuhyun leaps forwards and grabs Jo Mi’s arm to stop him from leaving. His imminent departure terrifies Kyuhyun. An obviously shocked Jo Mi tries to yank his arm free but Kyuhyun hangs on even tighter. He doesn’t quite understand why he’s doing this, or why he even has to do this. Kyuhyun is sure he looks ridiculous trying to hold onto a man in a CD shop. But he can’t help it. He just can’t help it.
“Why are you doing this?” he shouts and hears the hysteria in his voice. “Don’t,” his nails bite into Jo Mi’s arm.
Alarmed, Jo Mi gives an unintelligent cry and two men rush to his rescue. Together, they detach Kyuhyun from Jo Mi’s arm and throw him out of the shop. They pull down the shutters after him and ignore his pleas and urgent knocking, which last the entire afternoon. When the rapping finally ceases, they quietly lift the shutters up only to see Kyuhyun squatting on the floor outside the shop. He looks dazed. The shutters go down again without a sound. They are convinced Kyuhyun is crazy.
The knocking persists throughout the day. Kyuhyun refuses to believe it, Jo Mi would never. He would never.
Kyuhyun is still around when Jo Mi leaves the CD shop at night. The flustered Jo Mi quickly flees to his bike. Without thinking, Kyuhyun gives chase, stopping only when he trips over a flattened plastic bottle lying on the road. His bruised hands are now also cut and bleeding. He is in so much pain, the tears wouldn’t even come.
★
Kyuhyun hires a private investigator.
Zhou Mi is born in Wuhan, China, in 19 April, 1986. He arrived in Korea a year ago and currently works in a second hand CD shop in Chinatown, Seoul. He is the only child and regularly sends money back to his parents who now reside in Beijing.
The results of the investigation show that Jo Mi no longer exists in this world.
★
The following day, Kyuhyun goes to the CD shop. He doesn’t approach Zhou Mi, he just wants to make sure he doesn’t leave again.
The shop opens at 10am in the morning. Kyuhyun sits in the dim sum shop across the street, orders piping hot prawn dumplings and steamed black bean pork ribs that he doesn’t want and watches Zhou Mi opens shop. Zhou Mi looks around nervously before he unlocks the shutters and pushes it up stealthily. Kyuhyun sniggers and stops immediately.
The owner arrives only at 1pm. There really isn’t much to do, except play music. Kyuhyun discovers that Zhou Mi likes pop. He is both immensely happy and sad, although neither emotion manages to eclipse the pungent sense of regret. There is a lot he doesn't know about Jo Mi and he will never know.
In the afternoon, Zhou Mi goes out for lunch and Kyuhyun follows, a generous fifteen feet behind. There are a lot of restaurants in Chinatown, selling crispy barbecued pork belly on egg noodles, crunchy wontons with chestnuts in them, juicy boiled chicken with fragrant oily rice. The delicious smells stream out of opened kitchens into the streets but Zhou Mi stops at none of them. After some fifteen minutes of walking, he enters a shabby two storey building. At the entrance, he pauses to check the mailbox so Kyuhyun knows he lives there. He intends to loiter at the void deck and wait for Zhou Mi to finish his lunch. There is no guard to cast suspicious looks at him but it is a small neighborhood and the Chinese women who are hanging out laundry are talking aloud to each other while they throw nervous peeks at him. Kyuhyun scratches his head and heads for the nearby coffee shop. The waiter speaks only Hakka, so he orders a cup of coffee via hand gestures and waits for Zhou Mi to appear.
The walk back to the CD shop is taking longer than expected. A girl stops Zhou Mi and the way her eyes arc when she talks to him hints to Kyuhyun that there may be something more to their relationship. Even so, he won’t blame Zhou Mi. He can’t really fault him for forgetting.
The day at the shop is slow as Kyuhyun suspects it would be. When Zhou Mi isn’t dozing at the cashier, he is arranging the CDs and dusting the shelves. There’re a lot of Teresa Teng CDs on display. Kyuhyun’s mum used to play her songs when he was a child. Those foreign sounds are not beautiful to him; he always finds it hard to find beauty in things he doesn’t understand. They find their place in his memory anyway, he hummed them to himself in the forlorn Sunday afternoons when his mum refused to let him watch TV. But Zhou Mi plays none of her songs. He plays songs that make Kyuhyun’s mind rewind.
He remembers Jo Mi in vivid snatches of reminiscence. The creased back of his red and blue plaid shirt. The shrill of the tune he once whistled. The lingering sharp, sweet, smell of chocolate. The sticky moisture found in the night air. The piercing sting of glass on his skin. It’s as if the more he draws on them, the stronger they get and yearning becomes an accessory he wears on his chest. He remembers being loved but love wasn’t really an option for him back then.
Kyuhyun now retraces a memory he has put away carefully in the recesses of his mind. A long time ago, they had sat with their shoulders touching in the cramped sofa, listening to one song over and over again, with the dying sun between them. The world had failed to capture them for what seemed like forever but was in fact, just the time span of a CD. For that detached fragment of time, things were not so perfect but they were. They were nothing to the world and everything to each other.
After that, all Kyuhyun can do is to try and piece back the broken parts of their past so that they can be whole again. When the pain is really bad and pragmatism is poison, he gets the thinking that it’s because he didn’t fight hard enough. He is so immersed in the present, tries so hard to make it stay that he has forgotten to reach out for their future. Jo Mi did, he fought his best for them. But it wasn’t enough.
Kyuhyun thinks of lost time, the true meaning of it and tries not to cry.
At 8pm, the shop closes and Zhou Mi stops at the supermarket on his way back home. He picks up eggs, a bundle of scallions and a small cut of pork loin. Kyuhyun wonders if Jo Mi knew how to cook. The light in his apartment goes out at 11pm.
Kyuhyun heads home exhausted but he also feels absolutely heady with what he thinks is glee.
★
He only approaches Zhou Mi after a week. Give it time, he reminds himself, be patient, don’t scare him.
“No, wait!” he cries when Zhou Mi ducks behind cashier upon sight of him. Then Kyuhyun remembers the Chinese he has tried to learn. “Dui bu qi,” he says softly and the familiar words make Zhou Mi peeks out from behind a dusty stack of CDs.
“I,” Kyuhyun points to himself and says in Korean, “mistook you,” he points to Zhou Mi, “for another person.” Kyuhyun runs out of people to point at so he shrugs helplessly instead. “I thought you were someone else,” he lies, fluently this time. Something glosses his vision over and Zhou Mi becomes a multi-colored blot.
Zhou Mi nods slowly, he’s half convinced, even if he can’t possibly understand. Some people never change.
“Dui bu qi,” Kyuhyun repeats. There’s bitterness, caustic and poignant, on the tip of his tongue. “Jo Mi, I’m sorry too.”
Zhou Mi nods again, even if he isn’t aware that he’s acknowledging the apology for an entirely different matter.
“I come to sell this CD,” Kyuhyun pulls out the CD he brought from his backpack and presents it to Zhou Mi who brightens up. “You know this?” Kyuhyun asks tentatively. Hope converges into an infinitesimal point in his mental space and traps him there. “Someone once told me this is the loneliest song in the world.” Zhou Mi frowns. He calls someone over to translate for them. Then to Kyuhyun’s surprise, Zhou Mi beams at him and nods as if in agreement. The tears return in a deluge of emotions; Kyuhyun lowers his face.
“I,” Zhou Mi pats his chest to indicate himself and declares, “Zhou Mi.”
Kyuhyun’s smile is halting. “I, Kyuhyun.”
“Wo zen me jue de he ni you zhong si ceng xiang shi de gan jue,” Zhou Mi says with a bemused grin. He tilts his head and a lock of hair falls into his eyes. Kyuhyun shakes his head to show that he doesn’t comprehend.
“Si. Ceng. Xiang. Shi.” Zhou Mi repeats each word slowly and clearly. Kyuhyun shakes his head again. Zhou Mi calls the temporary translator over but that line is obviously too difficult for him.
“Ah!” Zhou Mi slaps his forehead. Reaching into his back pocket, he pulls out something no bigger than a handheld game console. It’s an electronic dictionary. “New!” he says excitedly to Kyuhyun, whose smile has died. He craves, he spurns, he falters. All this simultaneously.
But Zhou Mi doesn’t notice. He taps on a few buttons and shows the result to an estranged Kyuhun. “Umm,” he says, tapping the screen impatiently. “Si ceng xiang shi.”
Déjà vu.
★
dui bu qi > sorry
wo zen me jue de he ni you zhong si ceng xiang shi de gan jue > why do i feel like we’ve met before
long a/n made small
>credit, thanks and whales of ice cream to troy the beta. he’s a brilliant alcoholic, except. troy baby? pls. always check your zip
>thanks to the ‘person who makes delicious cakes’ for reading it over once and for all our astoundingly unastouding email convos which are made up of nothing but adorably useless gifs/pics/vids. saved our lives anyway
>excerpt from rant > at one point, i wished this fic was human just so I could murder it, watch its juice flow outta its body and drink margarita from its skull
>✫
edit#3 > hmmmm...for awkward reasons, i've changed kyu's specialization...i'm very very fail orz
“It’s true, isn’t it,” he says, voice strangely calm and serene. “That’s why you didn’t want to come back.”
That pulls the trigger. Jo Mi feels his fury comes unleashed.
“Why are you still here?”
There’s a loud crash when Jo Mi drags Kyuhyun up and slams him against the fridge. Before Kyuhyun can cry out, Jo Mi seals his lips with his own. The kiss is brutal. Kyuhyun refuses to open his mouth so Jo Mi forcibly cranks it open by pinching his jaw so hard, Kyuhyun thought it’s going to break. As Jo Mi’s tongue sweeps into Kyuhyun’s mouth, he feels those hands at his shoulders, trying frantically to push him away. Breaking the kiss, Jo Mi leans in closer to hiss in Kyuhyun’s face.
“Why do you think I’m still here? I thought you said you’ll do anything.”
All of Kyuhyun’s struggles die at his cruel words. Jo Mi peers into Kyuhun’s eyes. He can’t tell if that’s hope or hurt lurking in there, can’t tell if he’s breaking Kyuhyun or himself.
“I’m sorry,” he says because there’s nothing else to be said. He tries to put his arms around Kyuhyun but ends up pushing himself away from him instead. Kyuhyun slides slowly to the floor. He doesn’t make a sound. It makes Jo Mi wants to cry himself. He really doesn’t think he has a choice anymore. No one is going to help him with his questions. The realization made him so angry earlier.
Jo Mi's fingers close into a fist and resignation bleeds out from it, clotting into a single helpless word.
“Sorry.”
★
They don’t speak again until a call from Kyuhyun’s sister comes at 11:43am the following morning. Kyuhyun puts the call on loudspeaker. Ara is asking him to help her pick her daughter up from school. Kyuhyun looks fearfully at Jo Mi who nods. He agrees and they hang up.
“You won’t be able to avoid it anyway,” Jo Mi smiles reassuringly. “It is bound to happen.” A shiver runs through Kyuhyun and Jo Mi pulls him closer. “At 2:15pm, you will drive through Samcheongdong and knocks down a girl named Kim Heejing. She dies on the spot,” he reads off the copy of Tomorrow’s History he printed last evening. There’s a death grip on his arm. He strokes Kyuhyun’s back in a comforting manner, his fingers taper to the bumps of his spine and magic away the fear coiled in it. “Don’t worry, you have me.”
Kyuhyun turns to look at him. He still hasn’t said anything but there’s trust in the way his hand lays over Jo Mi’s. There’s trust despite all these inexplicable things happening to them, despite being trapped in a whirlwind they can’t claw their way out of. And then there’s last night.
Jo Mi is rarely honest to himself but he’s also a terribly untalented liar. He knows it’s because Kyuhyun doesn’t really have a choice too. But that doesn’t matter anymore. Jo Mi believes everything is worth it.
He stretches this moment into infinity.
★
“There are two conditions to make Notable Incidents possible. Firstly, you need to be in the Right Place. This is a constant because it’s controlled by Fate,” Jo Mi explains to Kyuhyun in the car. “So the place is always right. Fate makes extraordinary things happen.”
“Is Fate from your organization too?” Kyuhyun makes a turn at the ice cream parlor. “Latest Flavor! Pineapple Tart♥!“ says the stand board in front of it. They are nearing Samcheongdong.
Barking a laugh, Jo Mi replies, “Nay, no one has the nerve to tell Fate what to do. She is her own CEO.” He takes a moment to sober. “The second requisite is the Right Timing. A Notable Incident is slated to happen in the right place at the right time. Without either, it will not occur.”
The time on the dashboard is a blinking green 2:12pm. Kyuhyun’s knuckles are tight on the wheel. They enter Samcheongdong. The first ten meters is peaceful and the anticipation almost kills Kyuhyun. But then out of nowhere, a school boy dashes across the road in pursuit of his soccer ball. Kyuhyun is prepared, his foot goes automatically for the brakes but in a fit of agitation, he hits the accelerator instead. The car reacts immediately by speeding ahead. It crashes into a cart hawking handmade accessories and sends beads flying across the road, rainbow lights scattering in all directions as they refract sunbeams.
In contrast to Kyuhyun’s terror, Jo Mi is a picture of calm. Unperturbed, he takes out Molly II and is about to press the silver button on her when the bakery comes into sight. Horror, uninvited and suddenly overwhelming, sweeps over him, however, when he looks up and sees the donut girl standing just ten feet away from their car. She doesn’t even have time to turn her back. Jo Mi recognizes the red ribbon perched on the top of her head. Vertigo robs his breath. There’s a queer whirring sound, it drowns out everything but Kyuhyun’s voice.
“Jo Mi!” he screams, smashing his reverie, spurring him into action.
His thumb has just grazed the button when he drops Molly II. He lets out an involuntary frenzied shout. There isn’t enough time to unbuckle and dive under the seat for her.
“We’re going to cra-“ Kyuhyun’s scream dies in his throat, he braces himself for impact.
Jo Mi’s foot nudges Molly II on the floor. He takes a careless aim and steps down on her, praying reverently that he hits the right button. The glass of her face cracks under pressure, the sound crisp and distinct despite the chaos surrounding him. There’s a loud bang, tremendous force threatening to evict him from his seat and Jo Mi knows the front of the car is no more. The seatbelt catches him and he couldn’t breathe for a while as the forces squeezes the air from his lungs. It takes Jo Mi a long while to recover from his coughing fit and when he does, he registers darkness and the lack of motion. Blinking his eyes open, he sees an astonished Kyuhyun at his side. There’s a large red spot on his forehead that will no doubt develop into a bruise and cuts on his arms, but otherwise, he seems fine. There’s an expanse of white before them. They have driven the car into the wall.
For some time, all Kyuhyun can do is to blink and shake his head. Eventually he says, “We, I-we hit the wall. She was there, I was so sure….but it was as if the wall moved and we hit that instead.”
There’s a series of rapid knocks on Jo Mi’s window. It’s the donut girl asking them if they were fine. Jo Mi unbuckles himself and slumps in his seat to rest. Then he recalls and bolts upright to retrieve Molly II from the floor. She used to be scarred but her face is now disfigured beyond repair. The half of her face with the silver button is smashed in. But Jo Mi can still read the time off her. It is now 2:42pm. He rubs his thumb wistfully over the silver button. The open hand is tightened into a fist in the emblem engraved on it, ensnaring the numbers within its hold.
He has shifted time forward.
Donut girl is rapping on the window again. He turns his head tiredly to face her and feels his jaw goes slack.
“Gotcha~” Heechul sings.
★
Jo Mi is forced to leave Kyuhyun behind at the scene and go off with Heechul.
“No,” he wrenches his arm away from Heechul’s grip, “I have to-“
The hold turns vise-like. “Do you think you still have room to negotiate with me, Jo Mi?” Heechul gently warns.
‘He knows,’ Jo Mi realizes. The panic in him surrenders. “What’s going to happen now?”
“First of all, you’ll have to be locked up. And just so you know, no one messes with Molly. You shouldn't have tried to delete that email. She's such a tattle teller.”
★
Ryeowook visits him the next day. “How are you,” he says nervously.
“Fine,” Jo Mi replies automatically even though his expression relates a different story. He’s locked in the basement of their office building. There are rooms in here for locking up people who’re suspected of committing Time crimes. There’s only a bed in the room. Ryeowook stands awkwardly in the far corner of the room, the corners of his lips set stubbornly down. “It wasn’t your fault,” Jo Mi says briskly, he has little capacity to console others now. “The crime has already been committed even before our talk. What happened yesterday was my own decision.” Then his brows wrinkle in thought. “But I don’t understand why my future self sent the email to Kyuhyun.”
“You don’t understand because you’ve changed History.”
Both of them jolt at Heechul’s voice. “Leave,” Heechul commands Ryeowook who departs after a tiny nod directed at Jo Mi.
Heechul doesn’t wait for Jo Mi to ask him to continue. “The original History goes something like this.”
26 March 2012
They met at the Time Travel Convention. Kyuhyun was an associate professor who specialized in quantum physics. Jo Mi was a Timeshaker, present at the convention only to make sure no one succeeded in unraveling the secrets behind Time Travel. But of course that wasn’t what it said on his name card. There was an excellent book on quantum mechanics that Jo Mi thought Kyuhyun shouldn’t miss out on and Kyuhyun found no reason to disagree on that. They arranged to meet the following night.
31 March 2012
Things were moving much too fast (299,792,458 m/s, to be exact) for Kyuhyun’s liking. He told Jo Mi that. But Jo Mi only laughed and said, “It’s OK, you’re the right one.” When Kyuhyun expressed his doubts by pursing his lips, he added, “Trust me, I know. We’re written. In the stars, if you’re sappy enough.” Again, Jo Mi convinced Kyuhyun easily. Or maybe this was just beyond logic.
2 April 2012
Jo Mi ignored Kyuhyun’s call. All sixteen of them. He took a day off, rejected reality and crawled into his blankets. But late that night, he made a call to Ryeowook and woke him up with a seemingly innocent question.
3 April 2012
Jo Mi sent an email to Kyuhyun. He set the arrival date to 22 February 2012, thereby altering a tiny part in the vast spectrum of History and changing his life in a way he didn’t think was possible.
Threads of disbelief run through Jo Mi. “No, no, that couldn’t be,” he latches onto the loophole in Heechul’s story “Why did I send the email to Kyuhyun? That’s too much effort. It doesn’t make sense. I could have sent it to myself and still be able to stop the accident.”
When Heechul answers, his features soften into a look of pity. Jo Mi flinches instinctively. “Because you were still hoping to meet and fall in love with him.”
Jo Mi is quiet now. Too quiet. Heechul hears himself draw and disperse air. When Jo Mi finally starts talking, Heechul has to lean forward to capture his words. “That’s why the email vanished after Kyuhyun read it? Because the future has changed? I won’t be around anymore?”
At Heechul’s silence, he repeats, “I won’t be around anymore, would I?”
Patting his shoulder, Heechul says, “We don’t move time forward for a reason, Jo Mi. Nothing can make up for Lost Time. But what you did wasn’t so terrible, was it?” His touch picks up the chill in Jo Mi’s bones. “I don’t think it was.”
He moves away and the official tone creeps back. “The gravity of your actions will be decided by the Time Keeper. Your hearing has been scheduled. It will be held on the 19th of April.”
★
The day before the trial, Ryeowook pays him a visit again.
Harsh, white lighting in Jo Mi’s cells highlights the lack of sunlight. Jo Mi sits at the head of the bed, his head tucked between bent knees, looking like he’s waiting to be picked up at the Lost & Found.
“He is looking for you,” Ryeowook mumbles, uncertainty blanketing his form. He isn’t sure he should be saying this.
His words dissolve the invisible binds holding Jo Mi together. “Is he alright?” he asks eagerly. Ryeowook is shocked to see vestiges of hope shimmering on his face. He turns resolutely away from it. “Look at yourself, Jo Mi! He landed you in this!”
But Jo Mi is beyond redemption. “What did he say? Tell me what he said, Ryeowook, Ryeowook,” Jo Mi means to grab Ryeowook’s arm but he misjudges his strength and pulls him down onto the bed instead. Startled, Ryeowook pushes Jo Mi away. At his rejection, a cry of desperation escapes from Jo Mi. “Please,” he begs. The word barges its way into Ryeowook’s heart and singes. This isn’t what he wants.
“Forget him, Jo Mi,” he pleas in return. But Jo Mi is blind to his good intentions.
“Please, Ryeowook. Ryeowook! Ryeowook!” His cries become frantic shouts when Ryeowook makes to stand. “Please, I beg you,” A tear collides with Ryeowook’s hand and sears him. He recoils. “Please…” Ryeowook chances a glance at Jo Mi. Tears are still carving crooked lines down his cheeks. He seizes the sleeve of Ryeowook’s shirt like it’s a life buoy. Ryeowook tries to make him let go, tries to pry loose his white fingers one by one. But Jo Mi gasps and chokes on his breath, hangs on a little harder, cries a little harder, if that’s even possible.
Ryeowook wonders if he knows how to be cruel.
Jo Mi is still begging. “Please… just, just tell me if I’ll see him again.”
★
Heechul tells him to prepare for trial. So Jo Mi cracks his head open and spills out his thoughts. Relentlessly, he relives each of them until he reaches the final piece. The last time he saw Kyuhyun, they had been in an accident. And that’s what they are. They are made up of collisions, sparks and broken parts.
Train wrecks.
★
6 months later
A figure approaches Ryeowook as he steps out of the office building. Ryeowook doesn’t pause, he widens his strides instead. “I told you not to come anymore, Kyuhyun, he’s not here. I’ve told you things I shouldn’t have but that’s about it.”
Kyuhyun maintains his silence. He has exhausted all his questions a few months ago, excavated disjointed facts from Ryeowook and patched them up into a jagged timeline. Then he took a far longer time to digest it. Now he’s only waiting for Ryeowook to loosen up and tell a different story.
The quiet irritates Ryeowook. He should be getting used to it already but no, his aggravation accumulates like magpies and their stolen trinkets. Without warning, he whirls around to glare at Kyuhyun. But Ryeowook brakes too suddenly for him, Kyuhyun walks right into him and he would have fell if Kyuhyun didn’t grab hold of him in time. “Are you OK?” he asks. “You shouldn’t stop all of a sudden. It’s dangerous.”
That breaks the hundredth mark on Ryeowook’s anger meter. He pushes Kyuhyun away. “You!” He jabs a finger in Kyuhyun’s chest and finds, to his intense chagrin, that he has to elevate his head to look at him. “Stop following me and stop being so tall!”
Kyuhyun doesn’t say a word. Ryeowook is about to call it a day and reserve artillery for tomorrow’s battle when Kyuhyun opens his mouth. “Please,” he whispers. The word floats in the still of the night, rises above background noise and shoots Ryeowook down from where he stands. ‘Please,’ Jo Mi had once begged him. Ryeowook attempts to walk away.
Kyuhyun is unmoving. “Please,” he repeats even as Ryeowook walks out on him. The wind carries the sound to Ryeowook’s ears. His reserve sunders and he accelerates every step until he breaks into a run.
★
Unexpectedly, Kyuhyun doesn’t appear the next day.
And the next.
Ryeowook discovers he is more aggravated by Kyuhyun’s absence than his presence. He tells this to Kyuhyun when he appears again in crutches. “I thought you died, turns out you only broke a foot.” Then his tone turns somber. “I thought you gave up.”
Kyuhyun smiles sadly.
“Why don’t you give up?” Ryeowook persists.
The smile disappears. “I never had the chance to tell him.”
“Tell him what?”
Kyuhyun drops his eyes and smiles again. Ryeowook really means to sigh; he lets out a tiny screech of frustration instead.
“Leave.”
“Tell me something good enough to make me leave.”
“Can’t you tell I’m about to!” Ryeowook snaps. ‘Hope is a terrible thing’, he muses bleakly when he sees excitement, mixed with something like pain, floods Kyuhyun’s face. He has seen that look before, the first time Kyuhyun came to find him, demanding to know Jo Mi’s whereabouts. And then he witnessed its sluggish death in passivity. He guesses he’d be angry on Jo Mi’s behalf if Kyuhyun weren’t able to hold out for him but then he won’t exactly blame Kyuhyun either.
Yet Kyuhyun waits.
“You’ll see him again. History hasn’t changed all that much. He belongs in your future.”
That’s the last thing Ryeowook said to Kyuhyun. They never met again.
★
Kyuhyun has envisioned many times before the way they would encounter again. In his fantasies, they chance upon each other like how the leads in a romantic comedy might. That way, they would also have a fair shoot at their own happy ending. He finds solace in the belief that their finale is still a thousand takes away. He wakes up to possibilities everyday and lives.
Time is a procrastinator and for a whole year, Kyuhyun has to learn how to surface above his anxiety by weaving daydreams. As it turns out, they reunite under perfectly ordinary circumstances; while they are browsing in a second hand CD shop. Instead of the wild joy he has fabricated so often in his imagination, all Kyuhyun experiences is a deep sense of loss. This is what he has once held but lost.
He wants to do so much but all he does is stare. His grief is so quiet, it feels like the world - with all its noise and colors - is going to drown it out. This thought scares him. The suffocating urge to scream presses in on his sanity, gushes through his blood and sends him sky high on panic. But when Kyuhyun opens his mouth, his name is the only thing he utters.
“Jo Mi.” It’s barely a whisper. “Jo Mi,” he says again, his volume too loud for a small, sparsely patronized shop.
Jo Mi looks confused for a while and it occurs to Kyuhyun that this might not be reality. Because sometimes make believe is so real that he talks to himself. The familiar sense of agonizing disappointment surges through him, although it’s not quite so intolerable anymore. But then Jo Mi emits a sound of understanding and says in halting Korean. “Ah!” he exhales in surprise, even though he really shouldn’t be. This is Seoul, even if they are currently in Chinatown. “You, Korean? I no speak Korean.” He turns to leave.
“No!” On reflex, Kyuhyun leaps forwards and grabs Jo Mi’s arm to stop him from leaving. His imminent departure terrifies Kyuhyun. An obviously shocked Jo Mi tries to yank his arm free but Kyuhyun hangs on even tighter. He doesn’t quite understand why he’s doing this, or why he even has to do this. Kyuhyun is sure he looks ridiculous trying to hold onto a man in a CD shop. But he can’t help it. He just can’t help it.
“Why are you doing this?” he shouts and hears the hysteria in his voice. “Don’t,” his nails bite into Jo Mi’s arm.
Alarmed, Jo Mi gives an unintelligent cry and two men rush to his rescue. Together, they detach Kyuhyun from Jo Mi’s arm and throw him out of the shop. They pull down the shutters after him and ignore his pleas and urgent knocking, which last the entire afternoon. When the rapping finally ceases, they quietly lift the shutters up only to see Kyuhyun squatting on the floor outside the shop. He looks dazed. The shutters go down again without a sound. They are convinced Kyuhyun is crazy.
The knocking persists throughout the day. Kyuhyun refuses to believe it, Jo Mi would never. He would never.
Kyuhyun is still around when Jo Mi leaves the CD shop at night. The flustered Jo Mi quickly flees to his bike. Without thinking, Kyuhyun gives chase, stopping only when he trips over a flattened plastic bottle lying on the road. His bruised hands are now also cut and bleeding. He is in so much pain, the tears wouldn’t even come.
★
Kyuhyun hires a private investigator.
Zhou Mi is born in Wuhan, China, in 19 April, 1986. He arrived in Korea a year ago and currently works in a second hand CD shop in Chinatown, Seoul. He is the only child and regularly sends money back to his parents who now reside in Beijing.
The results of the investigation show that Jo Mi no longer exists in this world.
★
The following day, Kyuhyun goes to the CD shop. He doesn’t approach Zhou Mi, he just wants to make sure he doesn’t leave again.
The shop opens at 10am in the morning. Kyuhyun sits in the dim sum shop across the street, orders piping hot prawn dumplings and steamed black bean pork ribs that he doesn’t want and watches Zhou Mi opens shop. Zhou Mi looks around nervously before he unlocks the shutters and pushes it up stealthily. Kyuhyun sniggers and stops immediately.
The owner arrives only at 1pm. There really isn’t much to do, except play music. Kyuhyun discovers that Zhou Mi likes pop. He is both immensely happy and sad, although neither emotion manages to eclipse the pungent sense of regret. There is a lot he doesn't know about Jo Mi and he will never know.
In the afternoon, Zhou Mi goes out for lunch and Kyuhyun follows, a generous fifteen feet behind. There are a lot of restaurants in Chinatown, selling crispy barbecued pork belly on egg noodles, crunchy wontons with chestnuts in them, juicy boiled chicken with fragrant oily rice. The delicious smells stream out of opened kitchens into the streets but Zhou Mi stops at none of them. After some fifteen minutes of walking, he enters a shabby two storey building. At the entrance, he pauses to check the mailbox so Kyuhyun knows he lives there. He intends to loiter at the void deck and wait for Zhou Mi to finish his lunch. There is no guard to cast suspicious looks at him but it is a small neighborhood and the Chinese women who are hanging out laundry are talking aloud to each other while they throw nervous peeks at him. Kyuhyun scratches his head and heads for the nearby coffee shop. The waiter speaks only Hakka, so he orders a cup of coffee via hand gestures and waits for Zhou Mi to appear.
The walk back to the CD shop is taking longer than expected. A girl stops Zhou Mi and the way her eyes arc when she talks to him hints to Kyuhyun that there may be something more to their relationship. Even so, he won’t blame Zhou Mi. He can’t really fault him for forgetting.
The day at the shop is slow as Kyuhyun suspects it would be. When Zhou Mi isn’t dozing at the cashier, he is arranging the CDs and dusting the shelves. There’re a lot of Teresa Teng CDs on display. Kyuhyun’s mum used to play her songs when he was a child. Those foreign sounds are not beautiful to him; he always finds it hard to find beauty in things he doesn’t understand. They find their place in his memory anyway, he hummed them to himself in the forlorn Sunday afternoons when his mum refused to let him watch TV. But Zhou Mi plays none of her songs. He plays songs that make Kyuhyun’s mind rewind.
He remembers Jo Mi in vivid snatches of reminiscence. The creased back of his red and blue plaid shirt. The shrill of the tune he once whistled. The lingering sharp, sweet, smell of chocolate. The sticky moisture found in the night air. The piercing sting of glass on his skin. It’s as if the more he draws on them, the stronger they get and yearning becomes an accessory he wears on his chest. He remembers being loved but love wasn’t really an option for him back then.
Kyuhyun now retraces a memory he has put away carefully in the recesses of his mind. A long time ago, they had sat with their shoulders touching in the cramped sofa, listening to one song over and over again, with the dying sun between them. The world had failed to capture them for what seemed like forever but was in fact, just the time span of a CD. For that detached fragment of time, things were not so perfect but they were. They were nothing to the world and everything to each other.
After that, all Kyuhyun can do is to try and piece back the broken parts of their past so that they can be whole again. When the pain is really bad and pragmatism is poison, he gets the thinking that it’s because he didn’t fight hard enough. He is so immersed in the present, tries so hard to make it stay that he has forgotten to reach out for their future. Jo Mi did, he fought his best for them. But it wasn’t enough.
Kyuhyun thinks of lost time, the true meaning of it and tries not to cry.
At 8pm, the shop closes and Zhou Mi stops at the supermarket on his way back home. He picks up eggs, a bundle of scallions and a small cut of pork loin. Kyuhyun wonders if Jo Mi knew how to cook. The light in his apartment goes out at 11pm.
Kyuhyun heads home exhausted but he also feels absolutely heady with what he thinks is glee.
★
He only approaches Zhou Mi after a week. Give it time, he reminds himself, be patient, don’t scare him.
“No, wait!” he cries when Zhou Mi ducks behind cashier upon sight of him. Then Kyuhyun remembers the Chinese he has tried to learn. “Dui bu qi,” he says softly and the familiar words make Zhou Mi peeks out from behind a dusty stack of CDs.
“I,” Kyuhyun points to himself and says in Korean, “mistook you,” he points to Zhou Mi, “for another person.” Kyuhyun runs out of people to point at so he shrugs helplessly instead. “I thought you were someone else,” he lies, fluently this time. Something glosses his vision over and Zhou Mi becomes a multi-colored blot.
Zhou Mi nods slowly, he’s half convinced, even if he can’t possibly understand. Some people never change.
“Dui bu qi,” Kyuhyun repeats. There’s bitterness, caustic and poignant, on the tip of his tongue. “Jo Mi, I’m sorry too.”
Zhou Mi nods again, even if he isn’t aware that he’s acknowledging the apology for an entirely different matter.
“I come to sell this CD,” Kyuhyun pulls out the CD he brought from his backpack and presents it to Zhou Mi who brightens up. “You know this?” Kyuhyun asks tentatively. Hope converges into an infinitesimal point in his mental space and traps him there. “Someone once told me this is the loneliest song in the world.” Zhou Mi frowns. He calls someone over to translate for them. Then to Kyuhyun’s surprise, Zhou Mi beams at him and nods as if in agreement. The tears return in a deluge of emotions; Kyuhyun lowers his face.
“I,” Zhou Mi pats his chest to indicate himself and declares, “Zhou Mi.”
Kyuhyun’s smile is halting. “I, Kyuhyun.”
“Wo zen me jue de he ni you zhong si ceng xiang shi de gan jue,” Zhou Mi says with a bemused grin. He tilts his head and a lock of hair falls into his eyes. Kyuhyun shakes his head to show that he doesn’t comprehend.
“Si. Ceng. Xiang. Shi.” Zhou Mi repeats each word slowly and clearly. Kyuhyun shakes his head again. Zhou Mi calls the temporary translator over but that line is obviously too difficult for him.
“Ah!” Zhou Mi slaps his forehead. Reaching into his back pocket, he pulls out something no bigger than a handheld game console. It’s an electronic dictionary. “New!” he says excitedly to Kyuhyun, whose smile has died. He craves, he spurns, he falters. All this simultaneously.
But Zhou Mi doesn’t notice. He taps on a few buttons and shows the result to an estranged Kyuhun. “Umm,” he says, tapping the screen impatiently. “Si ceng xiang shi.”
Déjà vu.
★
dui bu qi > sorry
wo zen me jue de he ni you zhong si ceng xiang shi de gan jue > why do i feel like we’ve met before
long a/n made small
>credit, thanks and whales of ice cream to troy the beta. he’s a brilliant alcoholic, except. troy baby? pls. always check your zip
>thanks to the ‘person who makes delicious cakes’ for reading it over once and for all our astoundingly unastouding email convos which are made up of nothing but adorably useless gifs/pics/vids. saved our lives anyway
>excerpt from rant > at one point, i wished this fic was human just so I could murder it, watch its juice flow outta its body and drink margarita from its skull
>✫
edit#3 > hmmmm...for awkward reasons, i've changed kyu's specialization...i'm very very fail orz