Status: Closed
This round has closed. It remains open for fills, comments and remixes, but prompts are no longer accepted.
About
"If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more."
"What is grief, if not love persevering?"
"You kept me like a secret but I kept you like an oath"
Calling all readers, lovers of poetry and music, screen and stage. Quote collecters and lyric hoarders, unleash your archive. Each prompt must contain a quote - you can combine them, add commentary, link to articles, and more. Steal from a literary classic, or WeVerse drama. Have fun!
Examples
Minghao + Ocean Vuong
The most beautiful part of your body
is where it's headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.
Ocean Vuong - night sky with exit wounds
Hoshi/Anyone; "Beauty is terror"
Thinking about these two quotes together and the idea of on/off-stage personas:
"Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful we tremble before it. And what could be more terrifying or beautiful, to the Greeks to to our own, than to lose control completely?" - Donna Tartt, the Secret Histories
"I am calm in everyday life but when I put on my in-ear device and step on stage, I can feel the tension and hear the cheers getting louder as the music gets louder. When the staff tells me it's time to step on stage, I feel something boil inside me. I feel it steaming inside and I think I have to give a burst of something, spill what is inside me." - Hoshi in Hit the Road Ep. 04
Any ship; "It's been so many years"
Hello, hello there, is this Martha?
This is old Tom Frost
And I am calling long distance
Don't worry 'bout the cost.
'Cause it's been forty years or more
Now Martha please recall
Meet me out for coffee
Where we'll talk about it all.
Tom Watts - Martha
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Prompting
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Filling
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Remixing
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i was so young when i behaved 25
Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: arrested development, struggling to grow
Do Not Wants: None
Prompt:
[FILL]: tell me don't
Major Tags: NSFW-ish (rated M), sort of canon-compliant, unreliable narrator
Additional Tags: N/A
Permission to remix: Yes
crossposted to ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/36188005
***
Chan never knew Seungcheol slept in his parents’ bed for so long until he watched that interview Seungcheol did. He gets it, now, the way Seungcheol looks at everyone, the weight on his shoulders. It’s the opposite of Chan: the same numerals, the sign flipped. Positive to negative: we’ll make it through; I want to quit. Positive to negative: this is what I want. Negative to positive: debut, their first win, the first bit of money Chan can send to his parents, their first world tour.
Negative plus positive equals net zero. He hasn’t been to Iksan in months. Seungcheol doesn’t come with them to the venues. Chan imagines a trip to Daegu, all of them going to Jeju, someplace at least one of them is familiar enough with that it doesn’t feel as if the only calming place in the world is the inside of a hotel room anymore.
So he knows Seungcheol understands when he fiddles with his sheets in a lonely Hilton in Somewhere, America, and says, “Hyung, I can’t sleep.”
Seungcheol’s arm is comforting as he welcomes Chan into his bed. Calming, a baseline that Chan can return to. They used to sleep like this often, all in each other’s spaces, used to be like this often. There are no new fights to fight, at this point. Chan will realize, later, after quarantine, after the new dorm arrangements and new projects and the long months without Jun and Myungho, that the world always accommodates the urge to find new fights.
“What’s bothering you?” Seungcheol asks him, and Chan can’t tell him everything, because it wouldn’t be true. He wants to, though; he wants to let it all go, pour it all down the drain for one night like a child playing with a model sink, let it come out the faucet again in the morning. Let himself have these few hours alone without the ache in his shoulders and the cheering still ringing in his ears. He wants to go outside, but it’s late, and he’s not sure anyone would go with him, and he doesn’t want to go by himself into the dark parking lot, because it’s creepy, even though he’ll never admit that he’s afraid to anyone but Soonyoung.
So, “I just don’t sleep well,” he says, and prays Seungcheol takes pity on him.
But, “When I don’t sleep well,” Seungcheol says, “I try to wear myself out enough that my body puts me to sleep. Do you know what I mean?”
Chan doesn’t imagine it so much as remember his old imagining. “I’ve always slept in the same room as other people,” he says.
“That’s what the bathroom is for.”
Chan shakes his head. “I’m not getting up and going to the bathroom just to try to wear myself out. It’s too cold.”
Seungcheol shrugs and adjusts his arm around Chan’s head. “If you want to be a baby about it.”
Chan closes his eyes. That’s the problem, he thinks. He is, a baby about it. He’s the baby who’s not a baby, the adult who isn’t allowed to be an adult, the child who had no childhood. There’s no timeline when you’re an idol. He always thought he’d be a teacher if he weren’t this—either a regular teacher or a dance teacher. Now that he’s said it in a few fan signs, he’s done a little more research, a fun what-if exercise that always ends in equal amounts of heartbreak and euphoria. He knows more about the stages of childhood now, the expectations that are appropriate for certain ages. He can’t admit to anyone that he’s messed up. It’s something every idol either knows and has moved past or is in denial about; there’s no time to sit down and discuss it. What would be the point? It’s not as if there’s anything they can do until contract renewal.
“Isn’t it more adult-like to just try to push through it and sleep?” he mutters, turning his face into Seungcheol’s hand.
Seungcheol hums. “Adults know their bodies,” he says after a moment’s thought. “You’re a dancer, the most precise out of all of us. Don’t you know yours?”
A challenge. Seungcheol is a challenger the way Chan wishes he could be. Because he’s allowed to be. He’s the oldest, so he’s allowed to act young. He’s allowed to choose.
Chan shakes his head. He knows himself only as a dancer. His body has been turned into a dancer, his mind a dancer’s mind, a maknae’s mind. There’s no room for anything else. No room to be a partner on a dark walk down the driveway with the highway roaring distantly in the background, no room to let go. There’s no room to let go because then someone will have to hold the things he lets go of, and that’s a burden he cannot set on someone’s shoulders. They all have some amount of physical stamina, but they’re weak, Chan is discovering, and they are every one of them this close to falling apart.
Seungcheol’s mind has been turned into the leader, so he says, “Well, I have to piss, so you do what you need to do while I’m in the bathroom, and then we’ll switch beds,” and then he gets up, and the space he’s left is warm, so warm, and that’s that.
—
Chan had thought for so long that Soonyoung would be his first—first kiss, first anything—that he’s surprised halfway into a handjob with Myungho.
“You’re too in your own head,” Myungho tells him, and Chan says, “I know.”
“You should try meditation,” Myungho says.
“This isn’t exactly relaxing.” Myungho’s hands are long, pretty, just like all of him—graceful and beautiful. He knows things in a sideways sort of way, things that Chan doesn’t know. Chan has never been able to figure out whether that’s because Myungho moved to Korea from China or if it’s just him, if he’s able to think about things for real, the way Chan never feels like he can.
“It will be relaxing after,” Myungho says, and then he says, “trust me,” and Chan does, he does. He remembers a hotel room, Seungcheol’s fond smile at him as his eyes were closing, the warmth in the bed that smelled like Seungcheol.
“Is this what you mean by meditation?” Chan asks Myungho.
Myungho smiles. “No,” he says. He moves his hand faster, and Chan’s head falls back, and he wills himself to stay still, then to relax as Myungho guides him through being touched like this for the first time. “There are other ways to get out of your head,” Myungho says. “Sometimes—”
—
Sometimes you just need to get fucked. It’s a good concept, Chan tries telling Woozi, but apparently it’s not enough for his song.
“It’s hard to write about something you haven’t done,” Woozi tells him. Chan wants to say he has, he’s done it several times since Myungho and him—he’s done it with Myungho, he’s practiced by himself. Done his research surreptitiously, bought accoutrements, experimented when there was little else to do during quarantine. Left his new toys on the floor so he had to angle his camera away from his room while he did the only other thing he could do, which was turn on vlive and pretend he had a clue what was going to happen next. But he doesn’t argue. He picks up his sheet of paper and goes to try again.
—
Chan calls Soonyoung first, but he doesn’t pick up, and neither does Jeonghan, and Vernon is likely asleep all the way in America, getting in enough hours so he can drive to D.C. to pick Chan up, so Chan calls Seungcheol.
Seungcheol picks up on the first ring.
“I’ve never done this before,” Chan tells him. What he means is, I’ve never done anything by myself. All around him, he can see people younger than him who don’t seem as if they have parents with them. Certainly they don’t have managers. They’re university students who are probably in their second years, third years. People who have already served. People who likely don’t have as much money in their bank accounts as he does, who haven’t lived far from their parents as long as he has, who don’t have hundreds of people looking up to and scrutinizing everything they do. People who are free to talk to each other just to talk, who don’t have the fear of being recognized lingering in their minds the whole time. What if the flight attendants are fans? What if they make an announcement on the plane? What if someone has gotten the details of his flight, and there’s a whole entourage of screaming fans waiting at Dulles for him?
Just him?
“You’re not alone,” Seungcheol says, reading him. It’s true because Chan is with one of their managers, but he’s new and Chan doesn’t know how to talk to him, despite Jeonghan’s assertion that he’s friendly. He doesn’t know how to talk to anyone anymore, is so afraid of seeming stuck-up and in his own world that he’d rather just not say anything and instead go along where he’s pushed, be the perfect idol, obedient and blank.
“As soon as you step onto the plane, everyone on there is in it together,” Seungcheol tells him. “Then you just have to sit there until you arrive.”
Choi Seungcheol. Chan feels guilty, suddenly, about calling him. It’s meant to be his last break before enlistment. He’s supposed to be with his dad, with his family.
“I’ll be lonely,” he whispers. He’s heard Jeonghan say it so many times it shouldn’t feel like this much of a confession.
“I miss you,” Seungcheol says back easily. Chan grits his teeth and tries not to cry. Nobody would notice, because he’s wearing a mask and a hat and only is eyes show, but he hates crying. And he’s an adult, really. He doesn’t need to cry at the airport for no reason. He looks at his watch. Fifteen minutes before boarding.
“Hyung,” he says. “I can’t do this. They’ll look at me and expect me to have done things I haven’t done, and I won’t be able to—to give them what they want. I’m just a kid. Hyung, I’m just a kid. I don’t know anything.” He’s panicking. He’s been on planes before, he’s been to America before, and he’s older now than Seungcheol was when they debuted, and he’s panicking.
Seungcheol is quiet for so long Chan checks to make sure the call hasn’t dropped. But the numbers are there, still ticking upward: Two minutes thirty seconds, two minutes thirty-one.
“Just be yourself,” Seungcheol says. His voice sounds funny over the phone. Chan has wanted for so long to be like him that the thought doesn’t hurt anymore. “You know everything you know. That has to be enough.” What he means is, You don’t have a choice.
Re: [FILL]: tell me don't