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"Someone will remember us, I say, even in another time."
"How inconvenient to be made of desire."
"It's me, hi, I'm the problem its me."
Calling all readers, lovers of poetry and music, screen and stage. Quote collecters and lyric hoarders, unleash your archive. For this round, every prompt must contain a quote - you can combine them, add commentary, link to articles, do whatever. Steal from a literary classic, or copy WeVerse drama.
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Who's the real you?
Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: introspection, also consider unreality/fractured selves/dreamscapes/dopplegangers
Do Not Wants: None
Prompt:
—Rebecca Stead, Goodbye Stranger
I relate to you who can’t relate
Major Tags: Past Child Abuse, Murder
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Inception Fusion
Permission to remix: Please ask
Title from “Loveholic’s Hangover” by BIBI
Going for [1+1]
a/n: do you ever watch trust (2018) and promptly feel like you’ve been run over. this is to say that this fill is definitely partially inspired by trust (2018).
***
Junhui’s sitting at one of the tables in the courtyard of the engineering quad, the chair next to him empty. Despite there being no apparent breeze, his bottle blond hair is swaying in the wind, his feet swaying back and forth as he taps a pencil against his lips.
“Jeonghan,” he says, his eyes lighting up in delight when Jeonghan deigns to stop staring and finally join him, not even wincing at the screech of metal against brick as Jeonghan pulls the metal chair away from the table and sits down in it. “I was looking at the dream layout that your uncle sent us.” He says it casually, as if they’re discussing the weather and not the illegal part of Jeonghan’s uncle’s business where anyone can overhear them.
Jeonghan lifts an eyebrow but says nothing. They’re alone in the courtyard, the impending rain in the forecast driving the other students away. The sky is overcast and yet Junhui shines like the sun, his ambition too bright and burning to be contained within one body.
Junhui grins at him, boyishly charming, and leans in. Jeonghan, despite himself, feels his breath hitch at the intimacy, a side effect of conspirators sharing a secret. Junhui slides his notebook over, a perfect one-dimensional rendition of the first dream layout sketched out in pencil, and taps on part of it with his pencil eraser.
“We want to usher the crew into the second dream level around here,” Junhui says. “I was thinking that instead of having the kick be from these Penrose stairs ending, why not turn the stairs into Escher’s Waterfall? That way if the initial drop fails, then the water acts as a second kick.”
Jeonghan can’t help but be impressed with Junhui’s audacity to propose changes to the plan when their only role is to dream. “It’s our job to memorize the diagrams,” he says. “I would leave the logistics to my uncle.”
“Our job is to learn.” Junhui grins, sharklike. “And what better way to learn than this?”
It starts raining, and Junhui’s grin widens. Jeonghan can’t help but match his expression, feeling a little invincible himself, a little like swallowing the sun. Trust Junhui to treat a heist like an internship.
“Speak of the devil,” Jeonghan says as the first droplets of rain hit them. “It’s like you timed this.”
Later, they’ll be on a plane to South Korea where they’ll meet up with Jeonghan’s uncle, and they’ll call the whole trip a job interview when their classmates ask about their absence.
Junhui will wink at Jeonghan on the plane as Jeonghan pops some sleeping pills to knock himself out, and Jeonghan will grin back as he waits for sleep to take him.
Years and many jobs later, Jeonghan kills his uncle. The escort holds the door open for him as she leaves, and he slips past the foyer and up the stairs and into his uncle’s unlocked bedroom despite an animal instinct screaming at him to leave, a phantom pain in his cheek aching again.
His uncle’s paranoia extends to his bedroom. There’s a handgun sitting on the nightstand next to his folded glasses. Jeonghan quietly slips his own handgun out from his back pocket as he makes his way to his uncle’s bedside. He lifts up a spare pillow and holds it above his uncle’s face. He stays there, poised, steeling himself like he used to when he was young, a napkin in hand and mosquito on the wall. He stares down at his uncle’s sleeping face, peaceful in a way he never is when he’s awake, no furrowed brow or sneering mouth.
Jeonghan muffles his uncle’s face with the pillow and contemplates strangulation for a brief moment before his uncle’s breath grows shallower and his hands reach up in a panic, and then decides to go with a simple bullet to the brain.
“First you won’t adopt me, and now you won’t name me your successor?” Jeonghan asks the mess of brain and blood. “You can’t tell me that you didn’t see this coming.” He barks out a laugh. “Come on, Uncle, it’s time you finally retired, don’t you think? You get to die drunk off your small successes while I’m not afraid to dream bigger.” Jeonghan turns to leave. “What are you going to say to your brother? Sorry, I let your child stay an orphan instead of adopt him. I couldn’t beat the softness out of him.” He laughs quietly. “That’s okay. My father would probably say the same.”
Jeonghan pockets the bottle of sleeping pills on his uncle’s nightstand before he leaves the room. For all that his uncle had refused to acknowledge him as kin, at least they had this inability to dream and this sedated sleep in common.
It’s time that the old generation retires, he thinks. The ones that learned dream sharing through government intel and military projects and adopted all the machismo that came along with it.
Before he leaves, Jeonghan stops by the chess game set up in the living room, which is now perpetually in progress. He scans over the pieces before carefully picking up the one remaining white rook on the board and moving it. Mate in three moves.
A light rain has started when he leaves the house.
Jeonghan’s first totem is a white rook. It’s crafted to match his uncle’s chess set, but instead of ivory, it’s sculpted out of wood. Jeonghan patiently endured splinters and scrapes as he hollowed out the inside so that it weighs just enough for him to register that he’s carrying it, but no more.
He quietly fiddles with it when his uncle brings him into dreamscapes to teach him how to extract secrets, the chess piece now heavy in his pocket. As part of extractor training, Jeonghan’s mind has never been militarized. He’s taught to never bring his own projections into a dream. The first and last time his mother materializes in a dream, he nurses a swollen cheek for days.
But Jeonghan’s always been good at bending the rules.
Sometime after Junhui’s departure, Jeonghan’s totem changes.
A quick flash of a crescent smile from the cafe patron sitting beside him, a familiar laugh as he strolls through a city park, an upward tilt of the lips and a shine in his eyes every time they pass each other on the Penrose stairs, Jeonghan eternally ascending and Junhui eternally descending. His white rook stays in his pocket, light and useless, kept out of habit.
Jeonghan had never called him Jun, unlike their classmates and professors. He had insisted on learning Junhui’s name, the exact curl of the syllables, so that he could pronounce it the same way that Junhui’s parents did.
They were twined together once, sharing each other’s dreamscapes with nothing but their totems to anchor them as they drowned in nostalgia, searching for a past that never existed.
There are some places that Jeonghan will only be able to visit in his dreams.
Jeonghan doesn’t offer his mind for dreaming anymore, except to test out the dreamscapes that Wonwoo builds. Hopeless romantics are the best architects; they know how to hide their pining.
He laughs at the spiraling towers and boxy buildings outlining the courtyard. The dreamscape is so geometric and precise, a pastiche of Escher.
Jeonghan knows where he has to be for the kick, so he enters a building and walks up a flight of stairs, turning at the sharp angles, until he reaches a doorway that leads outside. At the top of the building is a pool of water that cascades down to the reflecting pool in the courtyard.
Someone’s waiting for him before the drop.
Junhui always smiles in his dreams.
This Junhui grins at him, all boyish charm, his hair still bottle blond.
“Jeonghan,” he says warmly, and Jeonghan finds himself standing next to him and reaching out for his hand, slotting their fingers together.
“I was thinking,” Junhui says, “about our first job.”
Jeonghan can’t help but smile back, steeped in nostalgia. He remembers the weeks he had spent convincing his uncle to bring Junhui into the job, the excitement of introducing Junhui to the world of dream sharing, and his uncle’s gruff acknowledgment after the job that Jeonghan was right to acquaint him with Junhui.
He doesn’t think about the sourness after, the quiet jealousy that he had tried to tamp down as it became evident that his uncle favored Junhui over him. Despite his best efforts, Junhui had noticed. They had their last fight over this, Junhui exclaiming that he didn’t want this and would gladly give it up for Jeonghan.
“Don’t be a fucking idiot,” Jeonghan had told him. “You’ve gotten everything that you wanted. You’re my uncle’s successor. Congratulations.”
Junhui looked at him, sorrow in his eyes. “I would choose you over all of this,” he said. “We could build our own dream sharing empire— we don’t have to work for your uncle.”
Jeonghan gritted his teeth. “Grow up,” he snapped. “We’re nothing without him. You might as well act smart about this and play your part and wait for the old man to die so that you inherit it all.”
“But then I lose you,” Junhui said, and he made everything sound so simple.
In that moment, Jeonghan hated him. “You’ve already lost me.”
Junhui was the devout one between the two of them, the one who honored promises. He left.
He left Jeonghan to the whims of his uncle, left him to endure jabs of how Junhui was a more forward thinker and could envision better plans than anything that Jeonghan had concocted. But between the two of them, Jeonghan was the better liar, and so he had simpered and waited and bided his time.
Now, his uncle’s kingdom is all Jeonghan’s, his dream sharing empire that he once thought would be shared.
“Why?” Jeonghan asks. “Surely there’s better things to think about.”
Junhui shrugs, his smile now rueful. “It was nice,” he says. “You can’t tell me that you don’t miss the simpler times? The hours that we spent hooked up to the PASIV?”
“I don’t miss the tiny dorm rooms or the ever-present smell of weed.”
Junhui curls their hands tighter together. “You don’t miss feeling on top of the world?”
“Why would I miss that,” Jeonghan says, “when I have that right now?”
Junhui looks at him placidly. “But your uncle—” he starts.
“Dead,” Jeonghan says flatly. “Everything the light touches is mine now, or however the saying goes.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Don’t be. I’m only sorry that your leaving finally spurred me into action,” Jeonghan says, “but that’s what dreams are for, aren’t they?”
Junhui laughs and brings his free hand up to tuck a strand of hair behind Jeonghan’s ear. “You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.”
Jeonghan looks at him. “Really? I could have my dream sharing empire and you too?”
Junhui’s lips curl up, his smile now smug. “Why not? It’s one plus one.”
Jeonghan shakes his head. Even his dreams have limits. “That wouldn’t work,” he says. “You wouldn’t want to be me with me if you knew.” There’s a secret forming on his tongue, crystallizing into something tangible.
“I think you give me too little credit.”
“I do?” Jeonghan asks. “So when I tell you that I killed my uncle, you simply nod and accept me with open arms, and we go back to playacting domesticity?”
In response, Junhui leans in, his eyes bright, and kisses Jeonghan. The first time they had kissed, Junhui had been eating instant hotpot, and Jeonghan had complained about how his lips now felt numb. Junhui had simply rolled his eyes and kissed him again.
In his dreams when they kiss, Junhui tastes like their first kiss, a choice that Jeonghan’s subconscious had made and that he chose not to change.
Jeonghan abruptly turns his head, Junhui’s lips brushing against his cheek. There’s no residual numbness on his lips and yet his mind is numb as dread pools in his stomach. There’s a familiar weight in his coat pocket.
“Who are you,” he demands.
Junhui always smiles in his dreams.
Junhui is now frowning, his brow furrowed.
“I’m sorry,” Junhui says, his voice the same devastated tone as when he had last said those words, a tone that Jeonghan had never bestowed upon his projection. He unlatches their hands and Jeonghan falters, already so close to the building’s edge.
Junhui pushes him off the building.
Jeonghan can’t tell if the fall or the water revives him, but he gasps awake in his bus seat, the whisper of a touch on his wrist where there’s faint bruising from a pulled IV line.
Disoriented, he turns in time to see a familiar silhouette exit the bus before the doors close.
Re: I relate to you who can’t relate
Re: I relate to you who can’t relate
Hopeless romantics are the best architects; they know how to hide their pining. This line caused me physical pain it's so good
and the ending like holy hell the ending I'm covered in goosebumps I can't even quote any particular line at you it's just the whole picture you've built up I'm honestly !!! shaking thank you for this
Re: I relate to you who can’t relate
Re: I relate to you who can’t relate
Re: I relate to you who can’t relate
Re: I relate to you who can’t relate
Re: I relate to you who can’t relate
Re: I relate to you who can’t relate
Re: I relate to you who can’t relate
[FILL] Who's the real you?
(Anonymous) 2022-12-26 09:08 pm (UTC)(link)Major Tags: substance abuse, off-screen violence
Additional Tags: anxiety, unreliable narrator
Permission to remix: Yes
***
You wake up with blood on your face.
You think it’s snot, at first, the tickle at the edge of your nostril, a dry flaking that makes your lip twitch. Only when you go to scratch, it powders under your nails, dull russet caked under the perfect white moons the manicurist files them into once a week. Snot isn’t usual baked red-black, and it doesn’t usually dry in tracks across your cheek, down to the corner of your mouth. You can taste it in your teeth, now, faint old penny tang beneath the overwhelming sourness of stale alcohol, thick enough to make you roll to your belly and gag, so, okay.
Okay.
You wake up with blood on your face. You don’t know why.
It isn’t the first time.
*
You could be a spy. You’re self-taught, true, but you had a good teacher. Drop you into any situation, no context provided: you’ll know the story within the hour. It’s all in their faces.
Breakfast time, seven full-grown men crammed around a single table. You start to piece together a timeline off of nothing but who can meet your eyes. This is after you’ve thrown up three or four times and brushed the rotting carcass from your mouth, cleaned the blood off your face. After you’ve opened a fresh bottle to sterilize the wound in your nostril, the bigger laceration behind your ribs. At least that one’s safe inside where no one can see it bleed.
It’s a bad game, but you have to play it, so: you shovel cornflakes between numb lips and look at each of them in turn, waiting to see who holds your gaze. Jeonghan passes, but Jeonghan always passes. He’s too good at the game. Joshua keeps staring at his phone, face slack, and he’s too good, too: hard to tell if he’s avoiding you or just zoned out. Jihoon, no. Wonwoo, Soonyoung, big fat Xs. Junhui—Junhui’s not even eating. Not even moving, really. An uninhabited body propped in a chair, doll eyes aimed unseeing at the tv. If you shook him, you think he would fall apart into his separate pieces and scatter across the floor. You’d worry he wasn’t breathing, except that you lean forward to check and catch the softest trace of a flinch.
It was a bad night, then.
You stare into the slowly dissolving cornflakes and dip into the shallow pool of last night’s memories, trying to tease up the freshest one you can find. It’s a smear of faces. Seungkwan’s pinched smile swims up, stretched thin with effort. Mingyu, laughing at you. Was he laughing? Mouth open, anyway, eyes bright. There’s no sound to the memory, but you can smell him, a blend of hair products and cologne. You could pick out of every member by scent alone. That has to mean something, right? That you tried. Even in the past tense.
Was he laughing? Or was it something else?
“Where’s Mingyu?” you ask, and the whole room stops to suck in a breath.
“I’m sure he’s in his room, resting,” Jeonghan says after a beat. “Why?”
Good question. It’s nothing you can articulate, just a feeling. Less than a feeling. Seungkwan’s smile, straining at the corners before it crumpled, and Mingyu’s open mouth. Was he laughing, or yelling?
“Is he okay?” you ask Jeonghan, a swing of the knife in a black room.
The pause is much longer this time. You keep your eyes on Jeonghan so you don’t have to watch the way Jihoon tenses, the way Soonyoung empties beside him.
Jeonghan holds your eyes, searching. You want to ask him what he finds.
“He’ll be fine,” Joshua says. He doesn’t look up from his phone. “The doctor said he didn’t break anything, just go easy with the hand for a few days.”
It opens inside you like a fist. Seungkwan with tears running into his smile, Hansol’s arms around him. Mingyu in your face, not laughing, how could you think he was laughing? One hand on your shoulder, and the other pushing right through you, flinging you straight into outer space.
There’s pure white after that, alcohol or concussion or just plain shock shaking your mind clean as an etch-a-sketch.
“Oh,” you say, just one syllable, but Jeonghan’s gaze sharpens, fine enough to cut. He shouldn’t be able to hear so much. “Should I…”
“You have a schedule in an hour,” Jeonghan interrupts smoothly. “Everyone needs to be back here by noon, there’s a quick interview and then they want to film content of us in the arena before soundcheck.”
His gaze has left you, words barely for your benefit. He says it all while his thin fingers neatly segment an orange, ends with a single golden wedge trapped between his teeth.
“I’ll tell the kids,” Jihoon says, standing like he was spring-loaded, and Jeonghan nods a dismissal. Quiet figures suddenly blossom to life around the room, shoveling in last bites and wiping mouths, making polite exits. In just outside five minutes the room is empty except for you and Jeonghan.
He’s looking at you in a way that makes the growing ache behind your eyes throb acutely, slow heartbeat pulses of pain. The spoon you raise to your lips is filled with whole grain mush. You try to take the bite anyway and gag, let it crash back into the bowl, spattering milk.
“Drink some tea,” Jeonghan says, pushing the cup into your hand.
He busies himself with piling up dishes while you force down the first sip. When you recognize the dull hard taste of what he’s added to it, you drink more deeply, tipping it back, a rush of relief that makes your head swim. It’s barely enough to steady your hands, but it’ll get you through a shower and a short drive, and then someone will have what you need. Some of the staff keep pity in their pockets for you these days. Jeonghan’s the only one who makes it feel like kindness.
*
You swim through your schedule, finishing early enough to have an hour alone back at the hotel before the interview, which means you either did really well or really badly. You don’t remember anyone frowning at you, so probably it was okay.
The world flicks by faster after that. Interview, pictures, the bright blur of the band around you, their happy noise. Recording content in the arena takes forever, endless loops of the stage, daisy chaining your way up and down the stands. You keep falling behind, getting stuck in corners until someone takes you by the wrist and leads you around.
Finally, finally the lights come up, and you have reached the only part of your day where you know exactly what to do. You don’t haven’t to think: when the music starts you hit every mark, every note, the way you’ve hit them a hundred thousand times before. The relief of being outside of yourself, moving in perfect formation and knowing the one right answer every time. You let it fill you up and hollow you out, the lights and the screams and the sweat in your eyes scouring you clean. You’re good at this. Even the other members look softly at you; even Mingyu tucks himself against your side and gives you a smile that trembles into something sweet and real. You pour yourself into these moments on stage and you burn away every other hour until you’re only this, a bright shining thing made of joy.
And after, when Mingyu’s no longer against your side but tumbled underneath you, you smooth your hands over his skin and feed joy back to him, small sips from your mouth and great glowing waves when he pants your name. You brush your lips over his swollen knuckles, the thin damp skin beneath his eyes, pressing joy into the hollows of his body. It’s a special kind of alchemy, transmuting the haunted look in his eyes to thin sweet cries, and he lets you work your magic, lets you spin him into gold. He doesn’t know it’s all sleight of hand, that he’s already golden. All you did was burn away the rust you left behind.
Re: [FILL] Who's the real you?
"It opens inside you like a fist." this line roundhouse kicked me and then I got bonus kicked by the fact that it's idolverse. good god!!! jeonghan making pity feel like a kindness. op i cannot express to you how much this is making me lose my gourd. sorry im like live-commenting as i read lol. "Finally, finally the lights come up, and you have reached the only part of your day where you know exactly what to do." urghhhhhh YEAH!! idolisms!! the relief of doing exactly what you're supposed to. you can't fuck up fondgazing at a crowd (or— you can, but at least you know how not to). and the last paragraph is so PRETTY after all the ugly of the second paragraph... op your MIND... thank you so much for writing this i'm obsessed!!!
Re: [FILL] Who's the real you?
(Anonymous) 2022-12-28 09:08 am (UTC)(link)