Ship/Member: Mingyu/Wonwoo Major Tags: N/A Additional Tags: Eternal Sunshine AU (with a bit of artístic license) Permission to remix: Pls ask!
***
There was something cold and hard against his cheek. It reminded Mingyu of someone’s shoulder, but he couldn’t remember whose.
He opened his eyes. He was sprawled onto the floor of a hallway, his hoodie soaked through with rain. He tried to stand but he’d lost his center of balance. There was a key in his pocket which fit the lock of the door in front of him, so he dragged himself over the threshold and into a dim, cramped room with a ceiling glinting dreamily with lights from a mirrorball on the floor.
It took him a few seconds. He smelled stale cigarette smoke and then the memory hit him like a bullet in the back of the brain: where he was, who was waiting for him.
“It’s three in the morning,” Wonwoo said.
He was sitting cross-legged on the bed, staring down at Mingyu. There was no fondness in his gaze.
“I’d never ask you to stay awake for me,” Mingyu said. It came out hollow. It was like re-enacting a dream he’d believed he’d forgotten.
“Why would you do this?”
Now the memory was beginning to reassemble in earnest. It was strange how Mingyu couldn’t recall exactly what came before or after but he could remember how the way Wonwoo was sitting, slouched and overly casual, cheek resting on palm, was the same way he’d been sitting the first time he had made eye contact with Mingyu across a crowded room.
It had been oddly charming at first. How he seemed so taken with Mingyu that he needed to hide everything he felt.
“Why would you do this to me,” Wonwoo repeated, his voice cracking.
It was growing beyond the words they’d exchanged in the past. There were feelings, too: bitterness, regret, the fear of being left. The fear of having to leave. The first time he’d asked it, Wonwoo’s question had been about only that night. Now it could be the more general question of why Mingyu had decided to get a procedure to excise him from every memory. Why he would ever want to leave Wonwoo no choice but to excise him in return. Mingyu crawled over slowly across the carpet and rested his cheek on Wonwoo’s knees because he didn’t want to look at his face. The walls of their apartment were mostly bare in the memory. Wonwoo was already succeeding in forgetting, too.
“Because I was lonely,” Mingyu said. “Because you made me feel lonely even though I knew you loved me. I thought I could live with it at first. But I guess I wasn’t as strong as I figured.”
“I don’t know why I’m putting myself through this.”
“Me either.”
“So leave,” Wonwoo said.
Mingyu could tell he didn’t mean it. But there it was again, just like it had happened the first time.
Maybe it was a sign that things would always end this way no matter which alternate reality they remembered themselves into. Mingyu nodded and put his key on Wonwoo’s knee, his hand trembling so hard it rattled slightly against the ring.
“Goodbye,” he said.
But this time, he didn’t get to the door.
***
“You never tell me things,” he said.
They were on the couch he’d pulled in from the street sometime over the summer, he couldn’t recall when because he barely recalled the couch itself as a definite concept. His head was in Wonwoo’s lap, competing for space with a book. He smacked a kiss onto the back one of Wonwoo’s hands even though Wonwoo was too busy with his book to react.
“I feel like I don’t even know you.” He had known even back then that whining didn’t work with Wonwoo. Now he was beyond caring.“I wanted to know you so badly. Didn’t you want me to?”
“You knew me,” Wonwoo said absently, petting Mingyu’s hair with the hand he’d kissed. “Before you decided to erase me from your head.” He seemed to be unfairly at peace. Mingyu fake growled and shook his head like a dog. Wonwoo glanced down and finally smiled. Mingyu had really loved that smile. The way his nose scrunched.
“What did you like about me? I mean, why me?”
Wonwoo’s hand paused, then resumed its stroking. “I could ask you the same thing.”
“You already know. I’ve told you. But I never ever knew what you were thinking, you kept it to yourself.”
Wonwoo put the book to one side and looked down at him fully. His hand moved under Mingyu’s head, where it anchored itself, knitting into his hair.
“You read into everything,” he said lowly. “If I was quiet it didn’t mean I was trying to pick a fight with you. Or that I didn’t want to be near you. You should know this by now.”
His shirt was buttoned lopsidedly, he’d skipped one. The stick-and-poke Mingyu had given him on his hip was peeking out and his glasses were slipping down his nose. Mingyu would never ever stop being shattered by him. Wasn’t that the problem?
“I miss you,” Mingyu said. “I missed you even when I still knew you.”
The hand in his hair tightened. He exhaled; he couldn’t help it.
“Just talk to me,” he said.
Wonwoo didn’t pull away. He drew closer instead. Both their breathing had gotten a little heavy. Mingyu waited.
“Sorry,” Wonwoo murmured eventually, his gaze flickering from Mingyu’s mouth to his eyes. “I still don’t know what I could’ve said.”
He slackened his hand and moved it away. They watched as it rested on the couch, flexed hard into a fist, and let go.
Mingyu disentangled himself from Wonwoo and sat up. He tipped his head back and watched the colors swirl on the ceiling instead of leaving.
His knee touched Wonwoo’s. He focused on it. He would be gone soon from this part of Wonwoo’s head.
He was still there in the room watching the colors brighten, feeling a little floaty and unreal, when Wonwoo whispered up to the ceiling like a prayer to no one.
“Let me out. I don’t think I want this anymore. I still want to… I still want to… please, let me out—”
***
They were sitting behind a rain-spattered window, watching the city outside.
Everything felt like it was slow motion— the hazy headlights of cars, traffic lights blinking green, the glossy streets. Mingyu had watched a movie like this once. He didn’t think it ended happily.
Grainy images flickered past in washes of warm red light. Each a different memory, their supercut running backwards. Through all the ways in which Wonwoo could dismantle him, in which he could dismantle Wonwoo in turn by not staying Wonwoo’s hand, through long silences and loneliness even when they were in the same room, through fucking and being fucked, through looking at each other when people could see, through holding hands when people couldn’t, through the time Wonwoo had asked if Mingyu even liked him and Mingyu didn’t know how to convince him other than to tell him not to ever leave, ever, because he didn’t know what he’d be without him.
He tore his gaze away. Wonwoo was watching him. Just watching him, his eyes bright and sorry.
“Come on,” he said, nudging Mingyu’s ankle with his own.
He slid off his stool. Surprised, wary, grateful, Mingyu followed him into the next memory.
***
Rain finely misted his face. They were standing in an alleyway lit by paper lanterns bobbing in a storm.
“I can’t really remember this one,” Mingyu said.
A slight smile spread across Wonwoo’s face. “You asked if I wanted to run down the street with you in the rain. I said, who, me? And you said, no, the other person standing here with me.”
It was coming back now. Before, they had gotten wildly drunk together in the empty restaurant Mingyu worked in after he’d closed down. Wonwoo had fled soon with the excuse of needing a smoke. Mingyu listened to the Cocteau Twins on the jukebox and looked from inside, through the droplets trickling down the windowpane, at Wonwoo under an overhang across the street staring up at the rain with a dazed half-smile.
He looked so different when he didn’t know he was being watched. Mingyu had felt a sense of possibility so keenly that it was like tears building behind his eyes.
“It made you feel a little out of your depth,” he said. “The whole night. It was overfamiliar of me. I know I’m right because you still see it so clearly in your head.”
“But you tried to fix it.”
“Yeah. I smiled so you smiled too. And I got a little closer.”
They both hesitated. Wonwoo took the first step this time. Watching him from this close-up was still new. It was terrifying how there would always be more of a person left to learn. How two people could look at each other after years and find a small black hole at one another’s center. How memory could be so mistaken.
“And then…”
“And then I said, come on. I don’t bite.” Mingyu’s voice had dropped to a hoarse murmur. Wonwoo’s smile went a little crooked. It melted away soon as they both remembered what Mingyu had said next. It had been a joke with a hint of earnest the first time but was now only the second thing. “Unless you want me to.”
Wonwoo was closer than he’d dared to get the first time. Their noses brushed. Mingyu had thought back then, I’ll do anything you want me to. Even after everything, when Wonwoo’s hands gripped his wet jacket collar, he thought it again.
“After this,” Wonwoo said. His voice was too dry. He cleared his throat and his mouth ghosted against Mingyu’s. “I said I had work early in the morning. And I opened my umbrella, and I left.”
“What if you stayed?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it.”
There was an unwelcome twinge somewhere in his heart. He shook his head and stepped away from Wonwoo’s grip, out into the rain.
“I think about it, I think about it all the time. If things would have ended different then maybe we would’ve— why couldn’t you stay?”
“I was scared.”
“Fuck you,” Mingyu said. “I was scared, too.”
The rain was soaking his socks. He wanted to go home, but he was starting to forget what exactly that was.
“We’re going to forget this in five seconds,” Wonwoo said, sounding very distant, “but I want you to know that I would have really liked running through the rain with you. More than anything in the world.”
“It’s too late,” Mingyu murmured, though it killed him to realize it again.
Wonwoo’s expression crumpled. He stepped out from under the overhang to join Mingyu and tried to say something, but the street was already becoming a long river of black, and the lanterns were sputtering out.
***
The first time they had talked:
Another rainy night, a few drinks, small conversations between the two of them, prickly on both sides as they’d felt each other out.
Later Mingyu had been drunk by the side of the road, stumbling home. Their mutual friend, his designated driver, had left with someone else.
A motorcycle had pulled up to the curb. He remembered being annoyed that anyone could believe he wasn’t self sufficient. He didn’t need to depend on another person. But when the visor came down to reveal Wonwoo’s eyes, all of the bad feelings had simply evaporated.
Now he only felt a bone-deep exhaustion.
“I know I should’ve stayed,” Wonwoo said. “And I know I should’ve said that earlier. I don’t want to forget you. I really don’t want to forget.”
“We can’t stop it once it’s begun,” Mingyu said softly. “I know. I tried, too.”
It cracked Wonwoo open but he still said, desperately, “Then tell me goodbye properly. Please.”
Mingyu swiped the back of his hand across his mouth and nodded. He mounted the motorcycle and gripped Wonwoo’s narrow waist as he had done a thousand times before. He smelled Wonwoo’s aftershave and cigarette smoke and soju and felt that his heart might burst. They accelerated and the tunnel’s fluorescent greens and blues streaked into long columns of light. For a while he watched the back of Wonwoo’s head through his tears.
He was thinking about their past selves the first time they had lived this moment. That Wonwoo, that Mingyu.
They hadn’t known about any of it. They hadn’t seen each other yet in every state of despair, elation, undress, humiliation, grace, love, too. Love, too.
Mingyu rested his chin on Wonwoo’s shoulder. It was cold and hard, but he didn’t mind. Ahead of them the strips of lights began to blink off, one by one.
“I didn’t want to forget you either,” he said even though he knew Wonwoo couldn’t hear him over the rain. “It’s just that I needed to.”
[FILL] But nothing is like the heart of a person
Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: Eternal Sunshine AU (with a bit of artístic license)
Permission to remix: Pls ask!
***
There was something cold and hard against his cheek. It reminded Mingyu of someone’s shoulder, but he couldn’t remember whose.
He opened his eyes. He was sprawled onto the floor of a hallway, his hoodie soaked through with rain. He tried to stand but he’d lost his center of balance. There was a key in his pocket which fit the lock of the door in front of him, so he dragged himself over the threshold and into a dim, cramped room with a ceiling glinting dreamily with lights from a mirrorball on the floor.
It took him a few seconds. He smelled stale cigarette smoke and then the memory hit him like a bullet in the back of the brain: where he was, who was waiting for him.
“It’s three in the morning,” Wonwoo said.
He was sitting cross-legged on the bed, staring down at Mingyu. There was no fondness in his gaze.
“I’d never ask you to stay awake for me,” Mingyu said. It came out hollow. It was like re-enacting a dream he’d believed he’d forgotten.
“Why would you do this?”
Now the memory was beginning to reassemble in earnest. It was strange how Mingyu couldn’t recall exactly what came before or after but he could remember how the way Wonwoo was sitting, slouched and overly casual, cheek resting on palm, was the same way he’d been sitting the first time he had made eye contact with Mingyu across a crowded room.
It had been oddly charming at first. How he seemed so taken with Mingyu that he needed to hide everything he felt.
“Why would you do this to me,” Wonwoo repeated, his voice cracking.
It was growing beyond the words they’d exchanged in the past. There were feelings, too: bitterness, regret, the fear of being left. The fear of having to leave. The first time he’d asked it, Wonwoo’s question had been about only that night. Now it could be the more general question of why Mingyu had decided to get a procedure to excise him from every memory. Why he would ever want to leave Wonwoo no choice but to excise him in return. Mingyu crawled over slowly across the carpet and rested his cheek on Wonwoo’s knees because he didn’t want to look at his face. The walls of their apartment were mostly bare in the memory. Wonwoo was already succeeding in forgetting, too.
“Because I was lonely,” Mingyu said. “Because you made me feel lonely even though I knew you loved me. I thought I could live with it at first. But I guess I wasn’t as strong as I figured.”
“I don’t know why I’m putting myself through this.”
“Me either.”
“So leave,” Wonwoo said.
Mingyu could tell he didn’t mean it. But there it was again, just like it had happened the first time.
Maybe it was a sign that things would always end this way no matter which alternate reality they remembered themselves into. Mingyu nodded and put his key on Wonwoo’s knee, his hand trembling so hard it rattled slightly against the ring.
“Goodbye,” he said.
But this time, he didn’t get to the door.
***
“You never tell me things,” he said.
They were on the couch he’d pulled in from the street sometime over the summer, he couldn’t recall when because he barely recalled the couch itself as a definite concept. His head was in Wonwoo’s lap, competing for space with a book. He smacked a kiss onto the back one of Wonwoo’s hands even though Wonwoo was too busy with his book to react.
“I feel like I don’t even know you.” He had known even back then that whining didn’t work with Wonwoo. Now he was beyond caring.“I wanted to know you so badly. Didn’t you want me to?”
“You knew me,” Wonwoo said absently, petting Mingyu’s hair with the hand he’d kissed. “Before you decided to erase me from your head.” He seemed to be unfairly at peace. Mingyu fake growled and shook his head like a dog. Wonwoo glanced down and finally smiled. Mingyu had really loved that smile. The way his nose scrunched.
“What did you like about me? I mean, why me?”
Wonwoo’s hand paused, then resumed its stroking. “I could ask you the same thing.”
“You already know. I’ve told you. But I never ever knew what you were thinking, you kept it to yourself.”
Wonwoo put the book to one side and looked down at him fully. His hand moved under Mingyu’s head, where it anchored itself, knitting into his hair.
“You read into everything,” he said lowly. “If I was quiet it didn’t mean I was trying to pick a fight with you. Or that I didn’t want to be near you. You should know this by now.”
His shirt was buttoned lopsidedly, he’d skipped one. The stick-and-poke Mingyu had given him on his hip was peeking out and his glasses were slipping down his nose. Mingyu would never ever stop being shattered by him. Wasn’t that the problem?
“I miss you,” Mingyu said. “I missed you even when I still knew you.”
The hand in his hair tightened. He exhaled; he couldn’t help it.
“Just talk to me,” he said.
Wonwoo didn’t pull away. He drew closer instead. Both their breathing had gotten a little heavy. Mingyu waited.
“Sorry,” Wonwoo murmured eventually, his gaze flickering from Mingyu’s mouth to his eyes. “I still don’t know what I could’ve said.”
He slackened his hand and moved it away. They watched as it rested on the couch, flexed hard into a fist, and let go.
Mingyu disentangled himself from Wonwoo and sat up. He tipped his head back and watched the colors swirl on the ceiling instead of leaving.
His knee touched Wonwoo’s. He focused on it. He would be gone soon from this part of Wonwoo’s head.
He was still there in the room watching the colors brighten, feeling a little floaty and unreal, when Wonwoo whispered up to the ceiling like a prayer to no one.
“Let me out. I don’t think I want this anymore. I still want to… I still want to… please, let me out—”
***
They were sitting behind a rain-spattered window, watching the city outside.
Everything felt like it was slow motion— the hazy headlights of cars, traffic lights blinking green, the glossy streets. Mingyu had watched a movie like this once. He didn’t think it ended happily.
Grainy images flickered past in washes of warm red light. Each a different memory, their supercut running backwards. Through all the ways in which Wonwoo could dismantle him, in which he could dismantle Wonwoo in turn by not staying Wonwoo’s hand, through long silences and loneliness even when they were in the same room, through fucking and being fucked, through looking at each other when people could see, through holding hands when people couldn’t, through the time Wonwoo had asked if Mingyu even liked him and Mingyu didn’t know how to convince him other than to tell him not to ever leave, ever, because he didn’t know what he’d be without him.
He tore his gaze away. Wonwoo was watching him. Just watching him, his eyes bright and sorry.
“Come on,” he said, nudging Mingyu’s ankle with his own.
He slid off his stool. Surprised, wary, grateful, Mingyu followed him into the next memory.
***
Rain finely misted his face. They were standing in an alleyway lit by paper lanterns bobbing in a storm.
“I can’t really remember this one,” Mingyu said.
A slight smile spread across Wonwoo’s face. “You asked if I wanted to run down the street with you in the rain. I said, who, me? And you said, no, the other person standing here with me.”
It was coming back now. Before, they had gotten wildly drunk together in the empty restaurant Mingyu worked in after he’d closed down. Wonwoo had fled soon with the excuse of needing a smoke. Mingyu listened to the Cocteau Twins on the jukebox and looked from inside, through the droplets trickling down the windowpane, at Wonwoo under an overhang across the street staring up at the rain with a dazed half-smile.
He looked so different when he didn’t know he was being watched. Mingyu had felt a sense of possibility so keenly that it was like tears building behind his eyes.
“It made you feel a little out of your depth,” he said. “The whole night. It was overfamiliar of me. I know I’m right because you still see it so clearly in your head.”
“But you tried to fix it.”
“Yeah. I smiled so you smiled too. And I got a little closer.”
They both hesitated. Wonwoo took the first step this time. Watching him from this close-up was still new. It was terrifying how there would always be more of a person left to learn. How two people could look at each other after years and find a small black hole at one another’s center. How memory could be so mistaken.
“And then…”
“And then I said, come on. I don’t bite.” Mingyu’s voice had dropped to a hoarse murmur. Wonwoo’s smile went a little crooked. It melted away soon as they both remembered what Mingyu had said next. It had been a joke with a hint of earnest the first time but was now only the second thing. “Unless you want me to.”
Wonwoo was closer than he’d dared to get the first time. Their noses brushed. Mingyu had thought back then, I’ll do anything you want me to. Even after everything, when Wonwoo’s hands gripped his wet jacket collar, he thought it again.
“After this,” Wonwoo said. His voice was too dry. He cleared his throat and his mouth ghosted against Mingyu’s. “I said I had work early in the morning. And I opened my umbrella, and I left.”
“What if you stayed?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it.”
There was an unwelcome twinge somewhere in his heart. He shook his head and stepped away from Wonwoo’s grip, out into the rain.
“I think about it, I think about it all the time. If things would have ended different then maybe we would’ve— why couldn’t you stay?”
“I was scared.”
“Fuck you,” Mingyu said. “I was scared, too.”
The rain was soaking his socks. He wanted to go home, but he was starting to forget what exactly that was.
“We’re going to forget this in five seconds,” Wonwoo said, sounding very distant, “but I want you to know that I would have really liked running through the rain with you. More than anything in the world.”
“It’s too late,” Mingyu murmured, though it killed him to realize it again.
Wonwoo’s expression crumpled. He stepped out from under the overhang to join Mingyu and tried to say something, but the street was already becoming a long river of black, and the lanterns were sputtering out.
***
The first time they had talked:
Another rainy night, a few drinks, small conversations between the two of them, prickly on both sides as they’d felt each other out.
Later Mingyu had been drunk by the side of the road, stumbling home. Their mutual friend, his designated driver, had left with someone else.
A motorcycle had pulled up to the curb. He remembered being annoyed that anyone could believe he wasn’t self sufficient. He didn’t need to depend on another person. But when the visor came down to reveal Wonwoo’s eyes, all of the bad feelings had simply evaporated.
Now he only felt a bone-deep exhaustion.
“I know I should’ve stayed,” Wonwoo said. “And I know I should’ve said that earlier. I don’t want to forget you. I really don’t want to forget.”
“We can’t stop it once it’s begun,” Mingyu said softly. “I know. I tried, too.”
It cracked Wonwoo open but he still said, desperately, “Then tell me goodbye properly. Please.”
Mingyu swiped the back of his hand across his mouth and nodded. He mounted the motorcycle and gripped Wonwoo’s narrow waist as he had done a thousand times before. He smelled Wonwoo’s aftershave and cigarette smoke and soju and felt that his heart might burst. They accelerated and the tunnel’s fluorescent greens and blues streaked into long columns of light. For a while he watched the back of Wonwoo’s head through his tears.
He was thinking about their past selves the first time they had lived this moment. That Wonwoo, that Mingyu.
They hadn’t known about any of it. They hadn’t seen each other yet in every state of despair, elation, undress, humiliation, grace, love, too. Love, too.
Mingyu rested his chin on Wonwoo’s shoulder. It was cold and hard, but he didn’t mind. Ahead of them the strips of lights began to blink off, one by one.
“I didn’t want to forget you either,” he said even though he knew Wonwoo couldn’t hear him over the rain. “It’s just that I needed to.”