EMOTIONS MEAN MORE THAN ANYTHING, AND FATE, IS WICKEDLY AMUSING - PART ONE
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The bottle was taunting him.
Funny wasn’t it, that his hands shook while holding a cigarette, and it was something that he had done one too many times. But he wanted alcohol in his system, more so than the drag of nicotine, and his hands were shaking too much to reach for it.
Squeezing the cigarette that he was barely holding, Jaejoong hit against the glass doors separating his room from the outside world, and looked up.
The darkness, whatever it was, had disappeared. But it was just as eerie. The atmosphere, what he was accustomed to, was still as different as the thick darkness that had overtaken the sky when it was day. What he saw, was clearly that it was night. But there was a brightness, an unusual lightness, that he could both feel and see.
The night, was something better than day, and he didn’t know how he was supposed to explain it to the others.
“Come on,” Yunho whispered, nimbly scraping his fingers beneath the thin vest. His nails caught the flesh below his nipples, and Jaejoong was breathy when they went further up. “I’m horny, you’re horny. We have enough time until we go out for dinner.”
Jaejoong laughed at the seriousness of his voice, the way Yunho always spoke with conviction and surety. They were best friends, closer than the others, but they were so different that sometimes it scared him.
Conviction and surety were the two things that could never be a part of him.
“I think you’re hornier than I am,” he told him, lips red as he kissed beneath Yunho’s chin. A hand was against his waist, and Jaejoong felt it move near his pants, dipping below the fabric of his skinny jeans and briefs. A finger crooked near the sink of his lower back, and Jaejoong groaned against his neck when it slipped between his buttocks.
“Mmm I believe I am Jae. But it’s because of that look you kept giving me. If there’s a reason for this hardness between my legs, it’s surely you. You’re at fault Jae.” His kisses were firm and sweet, and Jaejoong was moaning at the kneading that his palm gave, mouth gasping as he tried to find Yunho’s mouth to nip at his lips.
“Shit, you’re driving me crazy now Yunho. I wasn’t planning to have sex now. I promised to meet Hyunjoong before we go off to dinner.”
“Forget about Hyunjoong,” said Yunho, and his other hand, dipped low to grasp him by the ass and heave him higher. Jaejoong whimpered when his back hit the wall, not hard enough that it hurt, but just barely so that his breath was gone, and Yunho’s mouth was on his stomach, nipping and sucking at the flesh there. “Just forget about him. You can meet him some other time.”
“Yunho…” Jaejoong bit down on his lower lip to lessen the moan that Yunho was forcing from him, hands on his ass and tongue just swirling near his lower stomach. The other man had a wicked mouth that made his legs weak, especially when –
“God, Yunho,” he whispered, digging into tight shoulders for a better grip. “My hip bones are sensitive,” he whined, “You know this. Just…fuck.”
“Jae…”
His legs rose, and Jaejoong hissed when his mobile began vibrating along his thigh.
“Yunho,” he said, whimpering quietly when the younger man tugged on his pants. “Put me down. I need to answer my phone. It’s probably Hyunjoong.”
“Ignore him,” he muttered, and Jaejoong frowned for moment at his statement.
“I can’t. I won’t be able to meet him for a long while if I don’t see him today.” He smiled softly at Yunho’s childlike mouth, and touched his cheeks to kiss him. “I promise, after dinner. We’ll have all the time in the world then. We can sleep in tomorrow. And then go out for a late breakfast with the other members.”
Yunho cheeks were sunken, and it made Jaejoong realize just how much their schedule was taking a toll on him.
“Yunho?”
He blinked, rubbing his eyes, and nodding. “Yeah, okay.” He smiled at him when his lips curved lowly. “It’s fine. Go ahead.”
“Yunho…”
“Jae, it’s fine. Just go. Answer the call, before Hyunjoong’s thinks that something’s up.”
Jaejoong felt when he kissed his mouth once more, before he saw the back of a man, a puzzle, that sometimes he couldn’t fit together on odd days. Yunho was so beautiful in a way that Jaejoong could never be, and their relationship, was beginning to frighten him, frighten him to an extent that he was so sure that it would break him.
When it came to Yunho, he just didn’t know what he felt. He couldn’t understand himself, nor could he sometimes understand Yunho.
“You’ve been out here for a long time,” said Yoochun, closing the door and joining him outside. Yoochun had a cigarette of his own, and it reminded Jaejoong that there was one between his fingers, long gone out without him realizing. “Are you okay?”
Jaejoong forced a smile, a weak smile that probably did nothing for the way Yoochun was staring at him.
“Moderately,” he answered, and he did grin at Yoochun, turning to him. “I just…still feeling a bit…out of breath with everything that’s going on.”
“Ah, you mean the shit with the world disappearing and that we’re forcefully reunited? Nothing much about it,” he said, lips quirked. “And, I guess in your case, you’re still a bit…a bit…fucked, with Yunho kissing you and all.”
Jaejoong was confused with too dry lips that seemed pucker at his words. “How did you…”
“Yunho told us. Well, he was a mess too, at it. But it didn’t stop the urge of me wanting to punch him for it. He shouldn’t be–”
“I miss him, Yoochun,” Jaejoong spoke quietly. The other man had such beautiful looks, the way emotions took to his face, and he loved Yoochun, even the way he sometimes snored when they lay curled amidst satin sheets and too many pillows. “I miss Yunho. Seeing him like this…I’m unprepared. All this time, I’ve kept on hoping, and waiting that I could see him again, to touch him again so that he’ll be here, he’ll be real. And then…suddenly he’s here, and I don’t know what to do with myself. I want him to kiss me, to touch me, just to tell me ‘hello’ or that everything is going to be okay, but I don’t know. I don’t know, Yoochun.” His eyes closed as he tried to hold in tears. “I still love him. I just don’t know where we went wrong. We just…”
Yoochun touched his face, two fingers, just a stroke across his cheek. Jaejoong had seen him do that once, to his last girlfriend, when she was crying with her sweater bunched between her chest and her arms. Just a little stroke, and he did it so lovingly, and he remembered her looking up, with puffy eyes and a wet nose, and Yoochun had kissed her.
He had always been the one to fall so hard and with too much beauty, and Jaejoong just wished that he could love someone else, like everyone else, to sample, to taste. But Yunho had taken that from him. Because Yunho was the one. He had been the one that captured Jaejoong’s heart and never did give it back, even when Jaejoong had left.
Pain, maybe, the things they had gone through together, as a band, as people, as brothers, they never did once give up. Except when Jaejoong just wanted to try. Just to see if it was real. And then reality, his reality, had been torn apart.
“It’s not your fault,” Yoochun told him, looking out, and then to him. “It’s isn’t.”
Jaejoong smiled because there was nothing else that he could have forced. “Sometimes, I believe it was.”
Junsu had woken up on the ground. It was a while, until he realized where he was, amidst bottles in the room that Jaejoong and Yoochun used to drink when they hung out together late sometimes. It was even further time taken, until he remembered everything that had actually happened, with him, and the rest of them – all them, together in a rambling morbid mess of the world’s strangeness.
He smelt stale alcohol on sitting up, and through the windows that bore no blockage of curtains, he saw that it was morning.
“Can’t believe I actually slept,” he mumbled, wincing, eyes tightly shut before reopening them, and stumbling through the hastily opened door. They had all remained in silence after that, after the incident between the two oldest, and his own admission of what he had found out. He had spent the rest of that day – or whatever it was considered – trying to figure out what it meant, what it all meant, about their being no one else in the world, and why it was that time had stopped. But it made sense, he had thought, before his thoughts were clouded with the fog of sleep. It did. Everything had seemed as though the world had stopped for them, with cars and things being left the same, just as though time had become stilled.
And in fact, maybe that was what had happened. Time had stopped. They were trapped in some weird place where time was no longer applicable, because certainly, Junsu didn’t think that they were all going crazy, not in this way.
He met Changmin near the kitchen, spotting the leanness of the man lounging against the wall, and picking at a cigarette he assumed was one of Jaejoong’s.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” he said, and Changmin turned to look at him. As he did, Junsu realized what he was staring at from afar. It was Jaejoong, looking lovely with heavy eyes and ashen cheeks. He seemed away from them all, in thoughts and speech, the distant look he liked to give when he wanted to disappear. But he was still tampering with ingredients for breakfast, and Junsu was sure that they all knew by now that cooking was the only other therapeutic thing that could soothe Jaejoong into normalcy, beyond nicotine, alcohol and sex.
Changmin shrugged when he came closer. “I smoke on and off. Not like I never tried it back then.”
Junsu nodded, and leaned next to him, unsure of what he should do. “Did you get some sleep last night?”
“I’m not sure any of us actually slept much,” Changmin stated, and his eyes too were heavy, but with something else that was not weariness. It was skepticism and a thirst for the greater knowledge of their situation.
“I was up all night thinking,” Junsu began and Changmin’s mouth curved.
“Really?”
“Yah,” Junsu muttered, “I think.”
“So you say.” But Changmin was still grinning, and Junsu liked to think that maybe there was some progress between them, even with only a few hours of sleep.
“I think, maybe it was time that stopped. I mean, if time has stopped moving, then it explains everything, you know. Why everything is exactly as it is and it’s only us that just keep on moving. I know it doesn’t explain where everyone else is, why they disappeared and we’re here…or even why it’s just us but…” He slumped while against the wall. “It explains something at least.”
Changmin stared at his nearly burnt out cigarette, and didn’t look up even when they heard Yoochun shuffling through the corridor.
“I came to the same conclusion when you mentioned that.”
“What conclusion?” asked Yoochun hoarsely, wiping the dried saliva near his mouth. “And where’s Jae? I got up to piss and he wasn’t there.”
“Eloquent,” Junsu muttered, and pointed to where the kitchen was, just a bit away from there. “I’ve just joined Changmin in Jaejoong observing. But I think,” he whispered, “That something’s wrong with him.”
“You’re always so apt to point out the obvious,” Changmin told him, and eyed Jaejoong again before entering the kitchen. His footsteps didn’t seem to alert their eldest, because Jaejoong didn’t look up, nor did he seem disturbed from his musings of thin lips and light eyes. There was a permanent thinness to him that Junsu hated now, and he hated worrying so much over them, hated loving these men so much that it hurt. He had never meant to love someone like this beyond Junho, this dependency, but somehow, it came to pass that he was meant to.
But he watched, as Changmin stared at Jaejoong oddly.
He didn’t know what to think of how Changmin was feeling. There was bitterness, that Changmin was trying to clamp down in order to maintain a sort of peacefulness ever since they had joined together, but there were true emotions, faint fondness, that seemed to appear off and on when Junsu looked closely. He didn’t think that Changmin hated them right now, but nor did he like them either. There was memories, only memories, and right now, he thought that those emotions, came back with the way he was staring at Jaejoong.
Their youngest always had a sweet sort of love for their eldest. Not in the way he respected Yunho, or teased him as though he was a younger brother, or even Yoochun, who he loved and respected just a little lesser in the way that he loved the leader. It was something completely different. And Junsu never knew how to describe it, because he didn’t think that as Changmin had gotten older, had he ever wanted to love their eldest with the way he acted sometimes.
“You look like shit,” Changmin said finally, and Jaejoong jumped, gasping with a whisk in his hand and staring, open eyed at Changmin’s barren face.
“Changmin.” He said it quietly, making a fist and an odd shape with his lips. “You’re up. Did you sleep well?”
“Stupid question,” said Changmin plainly, and came closer, until Jaejoong stepped back . “You really look like shit. What happened?”
“Nothing,” he told him, tapping the whisk to the side of the bowl, and fingers fiddling to reach for a ladle. “I didn’t sleep.”
“You smell like cigarettes. A lot of it.”
“I smoked a lot of cigarettes,” Jaejoong clarified for him, but even Junsu, who was watching them, could see that something beyond had made Jaejoong so…petrified.
“You know, the problem I always had with you?” Changmin grabbed Jaejoong’s wrist, and his eyes were hard with age and anger. “Is that you always clam up when it comes to what scares you, to what hurts you. You like to help others. You like to hear about what ails us, what hurts us, but when it comes to yourself, you never really open up. And it fucking destroys you. We’re in a situation where you can’t afford to do that, so if you find something out, then tell us, even if it makes you sound crazy.”
Jaejoong trembled, and Junsu nearly rushed in, just as Yoochun had nearly done too. Maybe it was the terror, of the empty world, and the shock of it, or maybe, it was seeing Yunho again, their confrontation, that kiss that seemed to have shaken him more than anything had in a long while, but something was eating away at him, and Junsu wondered if it was just as bad as knowing that time had stopped for them.
“What if it really does make me sound crazy?” he asked him, slowly, and unsure. “It’s…just that Min,” and Changmin didn’t twitch at the familiar usage of his name. “It’s…last night, when the sky was dark, I didn’t see the atmosphere as dark. It was clear, it was light. It felt safe, clean, just…there, like how normality is supposed to feel. I spent whole night outside, because it wasn’t really night. It’s the opposite of what I had seen when it was day. It was not day. There was a darkness that just hovered, something dangerous, something that just…terrified me, and I’m telling you, it’s not safe to go out there, not with that darkness.”
He closed his eyes, and breathed, until the tremors stopped, and he was Jaejoong again, the Jaejoong who never appeared weak, and lead them always behind Yunho.
“I know what I’m seeing, Changmin. I just can’t…take it. I’m afraid to sleep in this nightmare. And I can’t sleep when the only time I can breathe is during the night, when there no longer anything to hide from.”
TBC
Nothing really happened because it's the first part of three (or four)
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