Status: Prompting Closed
This round is now closed to further prompts but remain open for fills and remixes (forever!).
About
"Enter any body of water and you give yourself up to be swallowed. Even the stones know that."
"beauty is terror"
"Would you fall in love with me again, if you knew all I've done? The things I can't undo. "
Calling all lovers of poetry and prose, rhyme and reason, screen and stage. Welcome to the Quotes Round, where every prompt must cradle a quotation (or two, or three). Mix the media and let the synergy birth a new order, or keep it short and let the subtext speak its secrets to the right writer.
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[REMIX] a love language?
Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: Vaguely similar situationship and musicians au
Permission to remix: Yes
Some annoying guy wanted me to project on him and kept bugging me about it... small ramble time
***
Not for the first time, Joshua wonders whether a home-cooked meal could be considered too much. Liable for misinterpretation.
By now he's built up quite the collection of Naver blog tabs, unable to stop himself from methodically scrolling through each one with too-frequent consultations against Papago and rigid dictionary definitions. A disproportionate amount of effort put into slogging through the steps and their visual aids, and yet he still hasn't been able to decide on a single recipe to follow through to completion.
It would have helped immensely if he had more time to prepare for this—a couple of days, or even a few weeks to engage in some trial and error and feel more secure about his choice. But, while he had known for a while that the Lunar New Year would fall on a weekday this year, he had only really learned yesterday that Jeonghan would be forced to spend it in America. Staying remarkably close to his apartment, in fact, with a relatively quiet evening in the cards—but far too little time free amidst his promotions to justify flying across the world and back within the space of a few days. Joshua had already known that he’d be free for the day after a mandatorily torturous stint with a bevy of producers and their studios, so his mouth had been able to impulsively take over and invite Jeonghan over for dinner before his brain could have a second—or even fully-formed first—thought about it. It’s not that he regrets it. It just would have been nice to ease into the offer with a bit more grace.
But what’s done is done, and it leaves him with his present dilemma of what exactly he should cook for Jeonghan.
Normally, he’d be quite content following a well-regarded recipe on YouTube or highly-rated cooking blog, trusting in the flavour combinations a worldly American cook has decided to recommend to the internet at large. In this case, his pride won’t even allow him to consider it for more than a second; why on earth would he go to the effort of cooking for Jeonghan, ostensibly with a completely coincidental overlap with seollal, without trying his best to replicate a more authentic recipe with a homecooked touch.
He could call his mum now, on the off-chance she’d have her personal variation on rice cake soup or the like ready to share, but the suspicious interrogation he would have to fend off as a result would not quite be worth the shortcut—especially when there would be nothing to warrant it. Instead, he’s sentenced himself to engaging in a new form of a private humiliation ritual, tapping the page translation button on-and-off far too many times when his eyes begin to glaze over at an anecdote overstaying its welcome beneath a photo of rinsed seaweed.
In all fairness, this is probably doing wonders for breaking up his forced-Korean learning of late—he’s going to run out of old Jeonghan content eventually, and the vocabulary he’s brushing up on largely covers completely different niches.
Joshua has already gotten sidetracked by a few translation rabbitholes, googling the odd slang term that crops up or trying to piece apart synonym mismatches. The latest was to figure out why so many different verbs were just translating into cut for him in English, and he is absolutely not going to remember what a single specific slice-or-dice-or-cut verb translates to after tonight. The sight of it, at least, does give him more motivation to just try and learn more.
It’s a disproportionately unpleasant reminder that translating between languages is never as simple as finding an exact, one-to-one match in meaning ready and waiting. Even though he’s still totally focused on painstaking recipe evaluation, his mind can’t help but extrapolate further.
His mum always seems as fluent as you can get in English, but even she must also run into this issue—trying to reshape and toy with a thought that doesn’t quite have an equivalent when translated from Korean, the annoying realisation that some specialised verb or idiom doesn’t have a tidy matchup in the English lexicon. In fact, he knows that she does, on occasion. It’s easy to pick out when you know what to look out for.
It makes him wonder.
How much of the real her is he missing out on, without that supplementary shared channel of expression? There must be so much of her left behind, as of yet largely inaccessible on account of Joshua’s deplorable grasp on his heritage.
For that matter—how much of the real Jeonghan is he not getting to know, too?
Joshua already knows some of the differences in how Jeonghan acts for a Korean audience than when he is in America. He certainly hasn’t felt scarily endeared whilst watching videos of Jeonghan acting cutely upon his fans’ requests, and he definitely hasn’t watched any specific clips enough times for their URLs to be added to his browser’s auto-fill, either. Anything that he has watched was selected purely out of academic interest; aegyo is a part of Korean culture, of course, and there are genuinely a lot of words being thrown around in those videos in permutations that he isn’t all that familiar with.
Even that is just a public persona, in the end. Jeonghan must have to filter out some parts of himself in private, with Joshua—hampered by English being the only common option to use, for now. Maybe he shaves off some rough edges, just enough to keep their conversations running smoothly. Maybe he reduces his personality down by an order of magnitude just so it can reflect nicely through the clouded looking-glass Joshua is forced to use with him.
There has to be some additional degree of annoyingly-delightful teasing that Joshua is missing out on. How much more menacing would his flirting be—a train of thought he quickly cuts off.
Although—even if Joshua gets to a decent point of Korean fluency, how much of himself would he have to tamp down in turn, to navigate smoothly? Bridging the gap would be the least he could do.
He really shouldn’t be getting this introspective over some random Busan officeworker’s nostalgically-tinged musings about the types of soups their grandmother would make for them—though now that his eyes have finally focused in on the text again, it makes him want to ask his mum if there was any particular reason behind her always making guk with a clear, dried fish base, as opposed to this person’s direction to use beef in its expected place.
Whatever he ends up going with, he’ll just have to trust the recipe, insofar as he understands it.
*
Although Joshua did break out the precious set of bronzeware cutlery he owns—he still doesn’t know when and how his mum organised this particular housewarming gift, but he takes caring for each spoon and chopstick set seriously—he otherwise worked deliberately to downplay the fact that any effort had gone into this at all. Whilst the soup was simmering, he had restocked some side dishes from the only asian grocer still open in the neighbourhood rather than try to make them himself, seasoned radishes and seaweed and kimchi arranged on the table but kept in their containers. The whole thing is toeing the line between casual and meaningful—hopefully firmly on the side of casual.
Still, as Jeonghan sniffs the air as soon as he crosses the threshold, Joshua is filled with the mildest sense of foreboding.
“Did you cook for me?” Jeonghan certainly looks delighted enough as he catches sight of the humble spread, the gently steaming bowls of rice and soup already arranged at opposing ends of the table.
Joshua is briefly filled with the warring desire to soak in some verbal praise, or to downplay it completely. Casualness wins out—why try and take too much pride in a likely flawed first attempt, after all.
“It was nothing—the banchan is going to expire soon, so it just made sense to put this together.”
“Hey, you didn’t even say that with an accent!”
Joshua hadn’t intended to show off that he’d made progress on shaking American vowels from his sparse Korean vocabulary, but it’s a happily accidental side effect. Jeonghan’s teasing marvel at it doesn’t even chafe. It undoubtedly would coming from anyone else.
*
Jeonghan hums with delight as he sips at his soup, and it’s only after that favourable reaction that Joshua drinks some of his own. He’d taste-tested as he went, of course, but it’s good to know that the unintentionally long period of simmering and reduction had only further benefited its flavour profile.
“Dude,” Jeonghan breathes, “you could open a restaurant with this, your sonmat is insane.” His exaggeration is undaunted by Joshua’s quiet scoff. “I love it.”
I love you, would be a great response to pull out and turn the tables with, right now—but saying it even unseriously just comes off conceptually as very gauche. In all honesty, the language-learner forums have not helped Joshua fully nail down the nuance of like and love when it comes to people. Even just the level of politeness to tag onto the verb, in this particular context—the sparse phrases in Korean he exchanged with his mum in childhood have turned a polite 요 into eager muscle memory on his tongue, and odds are high it’ll slip out at the end even if it might send mixed signals.
He doesn’t even know what particular signals he would want to send. Jeonghan resuming their private game of easing him into Konglish isn’t exactly an all-clear to dump feelings onto him, after all, even if Joshua is pretty sure it would be easier to talk about them in Korean; something about that detachment—the filtering he himself would have to do in a language he’s not all that fluent in yet—would let a dissection of the tentative truth flow out so much easier than he could ever manage in English, he’s pretty sure. At least in theory.
It’s not exactly the best time to test it, though. Maybe after enough months have passed. And if Jeonghan’s still entertaining all this with him.
“I'll quit singing when I can make tteok from scratch,” Joshua bats back, instead. “Which—you probably shouldn't eat all of, unless you've been counting it this whole time? You're already old enough as it is.”
To his credit, Jeonghan only needs a beat to process the redirection.
“Fuck off, we're the same age.”
“You're the one still using the Korean system—it never sounds like we are.” It's like Jeonghan wants to already be reaching his mid-thirties—an absolutely cursed concept.
“Shouldn't you call me hyung, then? Jisoo-ya.”
Joshua supremely regrets ever telling Jeonghan his Korean name. It shouldn't roll off Jeonghan’s tongue so naturally when Joshua isn't at all used to hearing it.
There’s a bold verbal crossroads in front of him, and he makes his decision quickly enough—hastily fishing out another rice cake slice from his bowl to chew on, pointedly. He definitely has not been keeping count, but he's pretty sure Jeonghan hasn't been either.
“Shut up, it’s just two months,” is the concession Joshua has to make, although he does put a mental pin in this whole thing for later.
Maybe it'll be worth teasing Jeonghan about his apparent hyung kink sometime after drinks.
(Hey—you're the one with the secret thing for older men. I can't believe I had to find out like this.)
(Jeonghan seems all too ready to suggest edging him in favour of another performative mouthful of rice cakes, but it’s definitely worth it.)
Re: [REMIX] a love language?
Re: [REMIX] a love language?