i'll go on
Jul. 13th, 2022 06:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sido_rlosvt | Jaejae and Seungkwan | G | 1,909 words
coming out, wlw mlm solidarity :'), background seungkwan x [unnamed] (it's verkwan)
happy viv day! thank you for messaging me about jaejae that one time :) i know you've read most of this already but i gave it an ending and that's what counts!
***********
In Jaejae’s living room, Seungkwan finds himself in front of the bookcase, a cheap, unsteady thing with a row of fake house plants balanced on its top.
He had hesitated at her invitation to come over—it had been late, the cafe employee eyeing them as she flipped the sign on the door from “open” to “closed”—but Jaejae had looked at him so warmly that he couldn’t help but clam up and nod, avoiding her eyes as they’d shrugged on their coats, stacked up their mugs, and slipped out into the freezing January night. “Besides,” she’d said, offhand. “What rumors could possibly start with me?”
So now he’s here, running his finger along this row of books, pleasantly worn around the edges and lined up neatly like multicolored piano keys. Most of them are in Korean, the lithe hangeul on their spines spelling out mainly English words. A couple of the books are actually in English, featuring bold type that makes the foreign words feel even more distant. But they’re all beautiful: weighty little gems of paper, board, and glue. Just looking at them gives him the same satisfaction that he takes in looking at his journal, a sturdy notebook he’d painstakingly picked out at the bookstore and dutifully writes neat little lines into every night.
The thought quietly embarrasses him. What does his secret, insignificant journal have to do with these stories, declarations, and manifestos?
“I haven’t actually read the English ones,” Jaejae says, settling onto the little gray couch behind him. Her hand twitches on the cushions as if at any moment, she’s going to spring into Hostess Mode and tell him for the third time to make himself at home already. Seungkwan recognizes the tic as one of his own.
Her place already feels homey, though. He likes the way they’ve just tossed their coats on the kitchen floor, where they lie in a boneless embrace. He likes the corkboard full of photos propped up on the back of the couch. They’re mostly MMTG snaps with guests he knows are her favorites, but he sees a few with distinctly poorer lighting—Jaejae with brown hair against the murky black of a summer night in Seoul, Jaejae in board shorts and a tank top at the beach, Jaejae sleeping on the floor surrounded by a few PDs he recognizes, making peace signs. There are even more photos without Jaejae at all: the same few people in red eyeshadow, in square glasses, in leather jackets, in the dark corner of a bar, grinning toothily into the sunshine burst of a camera flash.
And he likes the books.
“That one was a gift,” Jaejae explains, and Seungkwan looks back down at the book along whose spine he’s been absentmindedly running his manicured fingernail, feeling the embossed letters: Maurice. “It’s super old too. You know I’m not that bad at English, actually? But I don’t think I could ever get through that one.”
“I don’t think whoever gave it to you knew you very well, then, Noona,” Seungkwan teases softly.
“We saw the movie together,” Jaejae responds with a light chuckle. “It had subtitles. It was nice.”
Seungwkan’s eyes fall upon the next book, a slim, simple thing titled 계속해보겠습니다. He picks it up, taking in the stoic moon on the white cover, the Prussian blue text.
“That one’s pretty good. It doesn’t get gay until the very end, though,” Jaejae remarks.
His hand cleaving into the book’s pages for a glance, Seungkwan freezes.
The subject has been invisibly present all evening. At dinner, they’d talked MMTG—the upcoming guests, Jaejae’s grand plans for the future, a secret trip to France, another edition of 컴눈명. Next, at the cafe, Jaejae had demanded they talk about Seungkwan for a change, and he’d known that it wasn’t because she wanted all the juicy details of his idol life (though he knows she enjoys gossip as much as he does) but because she truly wanted to know how he was doing, what he was into these days—if he wanted to talk about anything. That’s one phrase she’s been saying to him more and more. Not that they speak often, but when they do, in a brief text exchange or the occasional phone call, she always signs off with, “If you want to talk about anything,” and he feels, almost ominously, that it has all been leading up to this moment.
Speechlessness is his least favorite feeling; his mouth twists in displeasure before he can stop it. He presses his lips into a thin, neutral line instead, and tears his eyes away from the book.
Jaejae at home is a little softer, a little slouchier, a little blurred-out at the edges. She’s got her hoodie pulled up over her hair, gone flat by now, and her hands are hidden in her overlong sleeves. Still, Seungkwan can’t help but be reminded how much more life she’s lived than him, not only because she’s a whole eight years older, but because she allows herself to live overlapping existences: half-celebrity, half-regular person. She’s been to college, she’s had relationships, she’s traveled on her own. There’s so much he doesn’t know about her simply because her life concerns her and no one else. She has no nebulous public for whom to live; instead, she exists within her own personal universe which appears so rich and complex and precious that Seungkwan feels that if he even stepped foot inside it for real, he’d burst it. It’s not a place for him.
“Seungkwan-ah,” she says, interrupting his thoughts. “You know you never have to say anything you don’t want to, right? I just thought,” she pauses, shifting her gaze to a point floating between them in a rare moment of diffidence. “You should know. That I can talk about it, if you want.”
Seungkwan swallows. A small, angry lump is beginning to form in his throat. “Is there something you want to say?” he says, annoyed at how breathy his voice comes out.
“Yes, actually,” Jaejae replies. "There is." She leans forward on her knees, the barest twinkle in her eyes. “Seungkwan, I’m a lesbian.”
Seungkwan huffs, annoyed. “I know that.” The tips of his fingers are buzzing the way they sometimes do before he strides onstage, and he clenches his fists to ward off the feeling.
“How’d you know? I never told you.” Jaejae counters, not unkindly. When Seungkwan presses his lips together tighter, she straightens up and flaps a hand at him. “Come, sit down.”
Reluctantly, Seungkwan crosses the few paces to the couch and seats himself gingerly across from her. Jaejae pulls down the corkboard from the back of the couch and plops it down between them, plucking the pin out of a photo directly in the middle. Unpinned, it slips to the floor by Seungkwan’s sock feet; he picks it up carefully and turns it right-side-up in his hands.
In the photo, a woman stares down the camera. Her mouth, curving in a twitchy grin, appears slick with lipstick, and her skin glows gold against a room shrouded in darkness. At first, Seungkwan thinks she might be dancing with an invisible partner, but then he notices the shadowy form in her arms—narrow shoulders in black velvet, short burgundy hair, the pale back of a neck hidden by one of the woman’s red-tipped hands.
“That’s Yideum, my ex,” Jaejae says matter-of-factly.
Without thinking, Seungkwan touches the back of Jaejae’s head in the photo, tracing down the barely-visible slope of her sleeve, before quickly withdrawing his hand. There he goes again, he thinks. Why does he always want to touch, get closer? “She’s pretty,” he says shortly, pushing the photo back toward Jaejae.
“I think so, too,” Jaejae says back, eyes crinkling.
Seungkwan tsks, trying to keep it casual even though he can't meet her gaze. “You’re strange, Noona. Who keeps a photo of their ex like this?”
In the corner of his eye, Jaejae shrugs. “Things are complicated. Don’t you have anyone you love that you can’t see anymore?”
Something twists in Seungkwan’s stomach. Not exactly, he wants to say. More like someone I can’t not see. His mouth falls open as if to say it—say it all—but he snaps it shut before he betrays himself any further.
Beside him, Jaejae sighs, not too heavily. “It’s not the best memory, this photo,” she continues. "Yideum was the one who broke up with me. She said something about how she couldn't risk everything for someone who could only see her after getting off of work at 3 am everyday." Jaejae smiles, a tiny, sad thing. "Actually, she said a lot of things about that."
Seungkwan just stares at his hands, twisting the ring on his finger back and forth to keep him from blurting out but what did you want? How were you going to make loving her work?
“But I didn’t wanna throw it away, or run away from it…” Jaejae continues, letting her words trail off. When Seungkwan just presses his lips tighter together, she huffs theatrically. “Seungkwan-ah, just so you know, I’m going to keep telling you about my chaotic and terrible lesbian love life until you talk to me, and it’s about to get really complex so get ready to learn some names.”
Her words startle a laugh from Seungkwan’s throat, bubbling up like champagne fizz.
“I…” he starts, then stops, closing his eyes as his heart kicks up, something warm and fluttery spreading through his chest even though he’d refused Jaejae’s offer of coffee at the door. He feels the light touch of her hand on his knee through his jeans, takes a slow, shaky breath. “I kind of do want to hear all about your chaotic and terrible lesbian love life, though.”
When he opens his eyes, Jaejae is grinning at him. “Fine," she says agreeably, a little teasing. "If you’re sooo curious.”
“You’re the one who offered!" Seungkwan sniffs, stridently blinking away the sudden warm tears in his eyes. "Threatened, actually.” Across the room, the bookcase blurs into a smear of colors.
Jaejae laughs, firmly patting Seungkwan twice with the hand that still rests on his knee. “Okay, wait, I have a notepad around here somewhere. I think it’d be best if we make a chart.” She leans forward on the couch to try and catch Seungkwan’s eye, voice softening for a moment. “But don’t cry, Seungkwan-ah.”
“Don’t point it out!” Seungkwan wails, but he’s unable to hold back the wet giggles that finally come pouring out. “Go, go get your stupid notepad.” He hiccups once, as if punctuating his sentence pathetically, and presses his eyes shut as Jaejae scurries over to the kitchen to rustle through a tall stack of papers on the counter. Tears slip down his cheeks, hot and welcome.
"Noona?" he says, eyes squeezed tight.
"Mmmnh?" Jaejae replies over a flutter of papers and the thrum of his heart in his ears. "I swear I had one somewhere. We might have to do this on the back of this Terra ad script--"
"Can I stay the night?"
The fluttering stops, and Seungkwan holds his breath. A second passes, then two, until he opens his eyes and blinks against the overhead light in the tiny, cozy room.
"Seungkwan-ah," Jaejae calls from the kitchen, voice soft and bright and near.
Finally, Seungkwan looks at her, standing tall in her clean, spare kitchen.
Jaejae grins. "You can stay as long as you want."
coming out, wlw mlm solidarity :'), background seungkwan x [unnamed] (it's verkwan)
happy viv day! thank you for messaging me about jaejae that one time :) i know you've read most of this already but i gave it an ending and that's what counts!
***********
In Jaejae’s living room, Seungkwan finds himself in front of the bookcase, a cheap, unsteady thing with a row of fake house plants balanced on its top.
He had hesitated at her invitation to come over—it had been late, the cafe employee eyeing them as she flipped the sign on the door from “open” to “closed”—but Jaejae had looked at him so warmly that he couldn’t help but clam up and nod, avoiding her eyes as they’d shrugged on their coats, stacked up their mugs, and slipped out into the freezing January night. “Besides,” she’d said, offhand. “What rumors could possibly start with me?”
So now he’s here, running his finger along this row of books, pleasantly worn around the edges and lined up neatly like multicolored piano keys. Most of them are in Korean, the lithe hangeul on their spines spelling out mainly English words. A couple of the books are actually in English, featuring bold type that makes the foreign words feel even more distant. But they’re all beautiful: weighty little gems of paper, board, and glue. Just looking at them gives him the same satisfaction that he takes in looking at his journal, a sturdy notebook he’d painstakingly picked out at the bookstore and dutifully writes neat little lines into every night.
The thought quietly embarrasses him. What does his secret, insignificant journal have to do with these stories, declarations, and manifestos?
“I haven’t actually read the English ones,” Jaejae says, settling onto the little gray couch behind him. Her hand twitches on the cushions as if at any moment, she’s going to spring into Hostess Mode and tell him for the third time to make himself at home already. Seungkwan recognizes the tic as one of his own.
Her place already feels homey, though. He likes the way they’ve just tossed their coats on the kitchen floor, where they lie in a boneless embrace. He likes the corkboard full of photos propped up on the back of the couch. They’re mostly MMTG snaps with guests he knows are her favorites, but he sees a few with distinctly poorer lighting—Jaejae with brown hair against the murky black of a summer night in Seoul, Jaejae in board shorts and a tank top at the beach, Jaejae sleeping on the floor surrounded by a few PDs he recognizes, making peace signs. There are even more photos without Jaejae at all: the same few people in red eyeshadow, in square glasses, in leather jackets, in the dark corner of a bar, grinning toothily into the sunshine burst of a camera flash.
And he likes the books.
“That one was a gift,” Jaejae explains, and Seungkwan looks back down at the book along whose spine he’s been absentmindedly running his manicured fingernail, feeling the embossed letters: Maurice. “It’s super old too. You know I’m not that bad at English, actually? But I don’t think I could ever get through that one.”
“I don’t think whoever gave it to you knew you very well, then, Noona,” Seungkwan teases softly.
“We saw the movie together,” Jaejae responds with a light chuckle. “It had subtitles. It was nice.”
Seungwkan’s eyes fall upon the next book, a slim, simple thing titled 계속해보겠습니다. He picks it up, taking in the stoic moon on the white cover, the Prussian blue text.
“That one’s pretty good. It doesn’t get gay until the very end, though,” Jaejae remarks.
His hand cleaving into the book’s pages for a glance, Seungkwan freezes.
The subject has been invisibly present all evening. At dinner, they’d talked MMTG—the upcoming guests, Jaejae’s grand plans for the future, a secret trip to France, another edition of 컴눈명. Next, at the cafe, Jaejae had demanded they talk about Seungkwan for a change, and he’d known that it wasn’t because she wanted all the juicy details of his idol life (though he knows she enjoys gossip as much as he does) but because she truly wanted to know how he was doing, what he was into these days—if he wanted to talk about anything. That’s one phrase she’s been saying to him more and more. Not that they speak often, but when they do, in a brief text exchange or the occasional phone call, she always signs off with, “If you want to talk about anything,” and he feels, almost ominously, that it has all been leading up to this moment.
Speechlessness is his least favorite feeling; his mouth twists in displeasure before he can stop it. He presses his lips into a thin, neutral line instead, and tears his eyes away from the book.
Jaejae at home is a little softer, a little slouchier, a little blurred-out at the edges. She’s got her hoodie pulled up over her hair, gone flat by now, and her hands are hidden in her overlong sleeves. Still, Seungkwan can’t help but be reminded how much more life she’s lived than him, not only because she’s a whole eight years older, but because she allows herself to live overlapping existences: half-celebrity, half-regular person. She’s been to college, she’s had relationships, she’s traveled on her own. There’s so much he doesn’t know about her simply because her life concerns her and no one else. She has no nebulous public for whom to live; instead, she exists within her own personal universe which appears so rich and complex and precious that Seungkwan feels that if he even stepped foot inside it for real, he’d burst it. It’s not a place for him.
“Seungkwan-ah,” she says, interrupting his thoughts. “You know you never have to say anything you don’t want to, right? I just thought,” she pauses, shifting her gaze to a point floating between them in a rare moment of diffidence. “You should know. That I can talk about it, if you want.”
Seungkwan swallows. A small, angry lump is beginning to form in his throat. “Is there something you want to say?” he says, annoyed at how breathy his voice comes out.
“Yes, actually,” Jaejae replies. "There is." She leans forward on her knees, the barest twinkle in her eyes. “Seungkwan, I’m a lesbian.”
Seungkwan huffs, annoyed. “I know that.” The tips of his fingers are buzzing the way they sometimes do before he strides onstage, and he clenches his fists to ward off the feeling.
“How’d you know? I never told you.” Jaejae counters, not unkindly. When Seungkwan presses his lips together tighter, she straightens up and flaps a hand at him. “Come, sit down.”
Reluctantly, Seungkwan crosses the few paces to the couch and seats himself gingerly across from her. Jaejae pulls down the corkboard from the back of the couch and plops it down between them, plucking the pin out of a photo directly in the middle. Unpinned, it slips to the floor by Seungkwan’s sock feet; he picks it up carefully and turns it right-side-up in his hands.
In the photo, a woman stares down the camera. Her mouth, curving in a twitchy grin, appears slick with lipstick, and her skin glows gold against a room shrouded in darkness. At first, Seungkwan thinks she might be dancing with an invisible partner, but then he notices the shadowy form in her arms—narrow shoulders in black velvet, short burgundy hair, the pale back of a neck hidden by one of the woman’s red-tipped hands.
“That’s Yideum, my ex,” Jaejae says matter-of-factly.
Without thinking, Seungkwan touches the back of Jaejae’s head in the photo, tracing down the barely-visible slope of her sleeve, before quickly withdrawing his hand. There he goes again, he thinks. Why does he always want to touch, get closer? “She’s pretty,” he says shortly, pushing the photo back toward Jaejae.
“I think so, too,” Jaejae says back, eyes crinkling.
Seungkwan tsks, trying to keep it casual even though he can't meet her gaze. “You’re strange, Noona. Who keeps a photo of their ex like this?”
In the corner of his eye, Jaejae shrugs. “Things are complicated. Don’t you have anyone you love that you can’t see anymore?”
Something twists in Seungkwan’s stomach. Not exactly, he wants to say. More like someone I can’t not see. His mouth falls open as if to say it—say it all—but he snaps it shut before he betrays himself any further.
Beside him, Jaejae sighs, not too heavily. “It’s not the best memory, this photo,” she continues. "Yideum was the one who broke up with me. She said something about how she couldn't risk everything for someone who could only see her after getting off of work at 3 am everyday." Jaejae smiles, a tiny, sad thing. "Actually, she said a lot of things about that."
Seungkwan just stares at his hands, twisting the ring on his finger back and forth to keep him from blurting out but what did you want? How were you going to make loving her work?
“But I didn’t wanna throw it away, or run away from it…” Jaejae continues, letting her words trail off. When Seungkwan just presses his lips tighter together, she huffs theatrically. “Seungkwan-ah, just so you know, I’m going to keep telling you about my chaotic and terrible lesbian love life until you talk to me, and it’s about to get really complex so get ready to learn some names.”
Her words startle a laugh from Seungkwan’s throat, bubbling up like champagne fizz.
“I…” he starts, then stops, closing his eyes as his heart kicks up, something warm and fluttery spreading through his chest even though he’d refused Jaejae’s offer of coffee at the door. He feels the light touch of her hand on his knee through his jeans, takes a slow, shaky breath. “I kind of do want to hear all about your chaotic and terrible lesbian love life, though.”
When he opens his eyes, Jaejae is grinning at him. “Fine," she says agreeably, a little teasing. "If you’re sooo curious.”
“You’re the one who offered!" Seungkwan sniffs, stridently blinking away the sudden warm tears in his eyes. "Threatened, actually.” Across the room, the bookcase blurs into a smear of colors.
Jaejae laughs, firmly patting Seungkwan twice with the hand that still rests on his knee. “Okay, wait, I have a notepad around here somewhere. I think it’d be best if we make a chart.” She leans forward on the couch to try and catch Seungkwan’s eye, voice softening for a moment. “But don’t cry, Seungkwan-ah.”
“Don’t point it out!” Seungkwan wails, but he’s unable to hold back the wet giggles that finally come pouring out. “Go, go get your stupid notepad.” He hiccups once, as if punctuating his sentence pathetically, and presses his eyes shut as Jaejae scurries over to the kitchen to rustle through a tall stack of papers on the counter. Tears slip down his cheeks, hot and welcome.
"Noona?" he says, eyes squeezed tight.
"Mmmnh?" Jaejae replies over a flutter of papers and the thrum of his heart in his ears. "I swear I had one somewhere. We might have to do this on the back of this Terra ad script--"
"Can I stay the night?"
The fluttering stops, and Seungkwan holds his breath. A second passes, then two, until he opens his eyes and blinks against the overhead light in the tiny, cozy room.
"Seungkwan-ah," Jaejae calls from the kitchen, voice soft and bright and near.
Finally, Seungkwan looks at her, standing tall in her clean, spare kitchen.
Jaejae grins. "You can stay as long as you want."
