Initial EXO: the fast and the heartless
Some AUs I Have Planned (But Will Never Write Because I'm Waiting For grisclair To Do It) #3:
at these speeds
drag racing au: kai is a drag racer. taemin used to be. so did sehun, but for different reasons. (spoiler: because he's dead.)
The funny thing is that these days, Taemin drives almost as much as he used to before he quit. Onew is the one who faked Taemin's credentials for him ("But it's true," he said, deadpan, "that you have years of expert driving experience," and then, "stop laughing, Jonghyun,") so he could land his current gig as a private chauffeur, escorting around a man who is worth almost as much alive as he is dead. Taemin, though, had fronted the money for his own defensive driving lessons, just so he could glimpse what it felt like to be someone who drove like he was afraid of crashing. He's never been good at lying ("Acting," Onew chided him on the phone afterwards) but this time it worked -- "I feel so safe with you behind the wheel," Chairman Lee had said the first time they were almost, but not quite, rearended on Bukak Skyway, close to the first place Taemin had ever wrecked a car.
Driving through Myeongdong mid-day is a kind of exciting that would have disgusted Taemin a year ago. Racing shoots through you like lightening on a clear afternoon, dissipating so quickly that you do it over and over again so you can trace the steps, jagged and clear, across the sky. Taemin isn't sure he has a metaphor for what it feels like to look back and see the swath of space left behind by his black BMW. But recently Taemin has taken to grinding his teeth in his sleep, and he thinks slinking through rush hour traffic, both hands on the wheel, has to be something like the release of pressure he feels in the morning when he wakes up -- knowing it will wear him, relieved all the same.
"It's sick," Kai had said when he first found out about Taemin's job. He'd crashed through the door of Taemin's newly emptied apartment to find him sitting on the floor drinking beers with Minho, and Taemin remembers hearing the fizz of the beer as it spilled into the carpet, thinking, thank god I got my deposit back already, as Kai had hissed, "Either leave it entirely or don't. Fuck this going halfway."
"Only a kid would say something like that," Taemin had sneered, and that's why he and Kai didn't speak for months, not until Taemin received his first paycheck and took all of his teammates out for barbecue and Onew chivied Kai out of his brooding sulk to come with.
Taemin has left all that behind. He rarely even goes to see the guys anymore, and Key always accuses him of throwing them away, after we spent so long raising you as one of us, he says when he's drunk, heavy arm around Taemin's shoulder like the pressure of a summer storm. Taking this job is a leaving more final than anything short of dying. "Don't worry about Kai," Minho had said that night as he gathered up their empty beer cans, "he'll understand one day, " and Taemin hadn't known then -- doesn't know now -- how to tell Minho, I hope he'll never learn.
Ask anyone in the Seoul drag racing circuit and they'd tell you that Taemin of SHINee quit after the death of Oh Sehun. And in a way those two things are connected. Taemin taught Kai everything either of them knew about racing, so for the first few wins everyone joked that they were doubles on the the track, twin dragons as they streamed down the inclines of Freedom Road, down from Imjingak Pavilion, smooth as freshly churned cream. But that was before Sehun -- Oh Sehun, whom everyone called Oh Mija to his face, whom Kai took under his wing as if he had it in him to be anyone's hyung, who was just a university student that wandered into Kai's life, then Kai's car, then the driver's seat of Kai's electric blue Nissan GT-R. And maybe that was why Kai's racing style changed, why Taemin suddenly couldn't beat Kai anymore the few times they did inter-garage rumbles, why they started calling Kai and Sehun ("maknae duo", Key called them) invincible, why Kai and Sehun started believing it themselves, until they picked a fight with the wrong rookie hotshot from B.A.P and Sehun misjudged his distance from a rail and crashed his secondhand Mazda RX7 -- the first thing he ever bought with his winnings -- so brutally there was no body left to pick out from the rubbish. Taemin remembers Kai's face at the funeral, as closed as the lid of the casket, and thought, he'll never race again, and he'd meant Sehun, and he'd meant Kai, and he'd meant that ghost racer that was the two of them, double exposed.
But afterwards Kai had gone back to the style Taemin still held onto, winning over and over again, at speeds so fast and races so frequent it made Taemin feel old and too careful and out of breath. Kai stopped coming to the SHINee garage and started his own, a little cabal of young lone racers -- a part-time financial analyst with bug eyes whose first race featured him lapping the second place finisher twice, a foreign business student from Hong Kong who was rumored to have gunned off a cliff and landed unharmed on a highway after one airborne, breathless minute.
After Sehun's death, no one ever told Kai that he resembled Taemin. When Taemin won on the Galma track that year, a fan had come up to him afterwards and, holding out her arm for him to sign, said, you looked like Kai out there, do you know him? Jonghyun and Key had flanked her immediately, pressing a beer in her hands and not looking at Taemin's face. The next day Taemin left his Hyundai keys with Minho and turned in his lease, and he hasn't looked back since.
"There's no one out there worth racing," Kai had said this afternoon, flicking pieces of corn in Taemin's face, and neither he nor Taemin say the last three words: except for you.
You can honor the dead without needing to bury them. When Taemin first taught Kai how to race, he'd said, "You're doing something wrong if you don't race like you're haunted." Taemin drives home now from the pizza parlor in his employer's new, safe car -- the plush leather seats, the over-rich sandalwood fragrance of the freshener -- everything noiseless and impenetrable, like black ice. Out of the corner of his eye he thinks he sees a battered white Mazda. It can't be Sehun's car. Taemin remembers seeing the wreck: the door crushed in, the paint peeling away, how shameful the metal muscle underneath seemed, exposed and unadorned. Nothing could have saved that car, and white Mazdas aren't as rare as they were two years ago, when Sehun bought his.
Still, when the light turns green, Taemin floors the pedal a little too hard. The car speeds up, hangs back when he releases, steady and responsive, like a well-trained dog testing the strength of a leash. The acceleration feels like taking a deep breath, like freefalling. Like the shine of Kai's eyes the first time Taemin put him behind the wheel and said, now you try.
but what if i could just make grisclair write ALL THE DRAG RACING AU instead also possibly i read like 10 different shinee metas just to write a few sentences?? I DON'T THINK I CAN RECITE ALL FIVE MEMBERS OF SHINEE??? ARE THERE FIVE MEMBERS OF SHINEE???? okay finally going to curl up and be a well-behaved sick person
at these speeds
drag racing au: kai is a drag racer. taemin used to be. so did sehun, but for different reasons. (spoiler: because he's dead.)
The funny thing is that these days, Taemin drives almost as much as he used to before he quit. Onew is the one who faked Taemin's credentials for him ("But it's true," he said, deadpan, "that you have years of expert driving experience," and then, "stop laughing, Jonghyun,") so he could land his current gig as a private chauffeur, escorting around a man who is worth almost as much alive as he is dead. Taemin, though, had fronted the money for his own defensive driving lessons, just so he could glimpse what it felt like to be someone who drove like he was afraid of crashing. He's never been good at lying ("Acting," Onew chided him on the phone afterwards) but this time it worked -- "I feel so safe with you behind the wheel," Chairman Lee had said the first time they were almost, but not quite, rearended on Bukak Skyway, close to the first place Taemin had ever wrecked a car.
Driving through Myeongdong mid-day is a kind of exciting that would have disgusted Taemin a year ago. Racing shoots through you like lightening on a clear afternoon, dissipating so quickly that you do it over and over again so you can trace the steps, jagged and clear, across the sky. Taemin isn't sure he has a metaphor for what it feels like to look back and see the swath of space left behind by his black BMW. But recently Taemin has taken to grinding his teeth in his sleep, and he thinks slinking through rush hour traffic, both hands on the wheel, has to be something like the release of pressure he feels in the morning when he wakes up -- knowing it will wear him, relieved all the same.
"It's sick," Kai had said when he first found out about Taemin's job. He'd crashed through the door of Taemin's newly emptied apartment to find him sitting on the floor drinking beers with Minho, and Taemin remembers hearing the fizz of the beer as it spilled into the carpet, thinking, thank god I got my deposit back already, as Kai had hissed, "Either leave it entirely or don't. Fuck this going halfway."
"Only a kid would say something like that," Taemin had sneered, and that's why he and Kai didn't speak for months, not until Taemin received his first paycheck and took all of his teammates out for barbecue and Onew chivied Kai out of his brooding sulk to come with.
Taemin has left all that behind. He rarely even goes to see the guys anymore, and Key always accuses him of throwing them away, after we spent so long raising you as one of us, he says when he's drunk, heavy arm around Taemin's shoulder like the pressure of a summer storm. Taking this job is a leaving more final than anything short of dying. "Don't worry about Kai," Minho had said that night as he gathered up their empty beer cans, "he'll understand one day, " and Taemin hadn't known then -- doesn't know now -- how to tell Minho, I hope he'll never learn.
Ask anyone in the Seoul drag racing circuit and they'd tell you that Taemin of SHINee quit after the death of Oh Sehun. And in a way those two things are connected. Taemin taught Kai everything either of them knew about racing, so for the first few wins everyone joked that they were doubles on the the track, twin dragons as they streamed down the inclines of Freedom Road, down from Imjingak Pavilion, smooth as freshly churned cream. But that was before Sehun -- Oh Sehun, whom everyone called Oh Mija to his face, whom Kai took under his wing as if he had it in him to be anyone's hyung, who was just a university student that wandered into Kai's life, then Kai's car, then the driver's seat of Kai's electric blue Nissan GT-R. And maybe that was why Kai's racing style changed, why Taemin suddenly couldn't beat Kai anymore the few times they did inter-garage rumbles, why they started calling Kai and Sehun ("maknae duo", Key called them) invincible, why Kai and Sehun started believing it themselves, until they picked a fight with the wrong rookie hotshot from B.A.P and Sehun misjudged his distance from a rail and crashed his secondhand Mazda RX7 -- the first thing he ever bought with his winnings -- so brutally there was no body left to pick out from the rubbish. Taemin remembers Kai's face at the funeral, as closed as the lid of the casket, and thought, he'll never race again, and he'd meant Sehun, and he'd meant Kai, and he'd meant that ghost racer that was the two of them, double exposed.
But afterwards Kai had gone back to the style Taemin still held onto, winning over and over again, at speeds so fast and races so frequent it made Taemin feel old and too careful and out of breath. Kai stopped coming to the SHINee garage and started his own, a little cabal of young lone racers -- a part-time financial analyst with bug eyes whose first race featured him lapping the second place finisher twice, a foreign business student from Hong Kong who was rumored to have gunned off a cliff and landed unharmed on a highway after one airborne, breathless minute.
After Sehun's death, no one ever told Kai that he resembled Taemin. When Taemin won on the Galma track that year, a fan had come up to him afterwards and, holding out her arm for him to sign, said, you looked like Kai out there, do you know him? Jonghyun and Key had flanked her immediately, pressing a beer in her hands and not looking at Taemin's face. The next day Taemin left his Hyundai keys with Minho and turned in his lease, and he hasn't looked back since.
"There's no one out there worth racing," Kai had said this afternoon, flicking pieces of corn in Taemin's face, and neither he nor Taemin say the last three words: except for you.
You can honor the dead without needing to bury them. When Taemin first taught Kai how to race, he'd said, "You're doing something wrong if you don't race like you're haunted." Taemin drives home now from the pizza parlor in his employer's new, safe car -- the plush leather seats, the over-rich sandalwood fragrance of the freshener -- everything noiseless and impenetrable, like black ice. Out of the corner of his eye he thinks he sees a battered white Mazda. It can't be Sehun's car. Taemin remembers seeing the wreck: the door crushed in, the paint peeling away, how shameful the metal muscle underneath seemed, exposed and unadorned. Nothing could have saved that car, and white Mazdas aren't as rare as they were two years ago, when Sehun bought his.
Still, when the light turns green, Taemin floors the pedal a little too hard. The car speeds up, hangs back when he releases, steady and responsive, like a well-trained dog testing the strength of a leash. The acceleration feels like taking a deep breath, like freefalling. Like the shine of Kai's eyes the first time Taemin put him behind the wheel and said, now you try.
but what if i could just make grisclair write ALL THE DRAG RACING AU instead also possibly i read like 10 different shinee metas just to write a few sentences?? I DON'T THINK I CAN RECITE ALL FIVE MEMBERS OF SHINEE??? ARE THERE FIVE MEMBERS OF SHINEE???? okay finally going to curl up and be a well-behaved sick person