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Kun’s fingertips hover above the piano tiles, gaze traveling over every part of the mostly empty practice room. He doesn’t look at him but he knows Ten is watching him, quietly observing the slightest shift in his expression and listening to his every breath, waiting. He doesn’t look at him, but he still feels his presence in the room and it’s enough to suffocate him.
Ten is seeing him and it’s scary in a way that makes him want to hide. He slumps in his chair, pulling his sleeves further down his wrists. Sometimes Kun feels less like a person and more like a collection of different types of fear. It’s easier to not think about it when the kids are around, loud and bustling and buzzing with so much energy that sometimes he can’t keep up with them.
Ten lets out an audible groan as he stands up from his position on the floor. Kun forces himself to avoid his own reflection in front of him. He can still feel Ten’s stare on the side of his face, demanding answers in his own unsettling, observant way. It has never made sense to Kun, how Ten can read him so easily, as if he’s peeling his skin off his bones and leaving everything out in the open, all the cracks and stains etched into his flesh, even when Kun tries hard to give nothing away. Maybe it never will.
“Kun,” he says, echoing within the four walls of the practice room like a distant call.
He turns to him then, and everything pours out. It seeps from his skin, past his clothes, and surrounds them, mixing and thickening with the air inside the room, threatening to choke him. But then Ten smiles at him and his eyes are the most beautiful thing Kun has ever seen—lonely and tired and sincere, gentle and kind and, if Kun allows himself to hope, loving.
It’s hard to let himself have something like that when he knows he doesn’t deserve it, but the thing is, he wants to deserve it. He wants to deserve it so bad.
“Sing for me, ge.”
Kun breathes deep, and his fingers move along the keys as he creates melodies. He looks up to an image he’s seen hundreds—maybe thousands, even—of times, both in dreams and in realities just close enough for him to reach out and touch if he wanted to.
Ten’s eyes are closed, long lashes fluttering softly against the glowing skin of his cheeks. It starts with his hands: fingers moving as if he’s the one pressing the keys, and then Kun sings and his voice ghosts over to Ten in strings and attaches to his limbs, and slowly, as the seconds pass, Ten becomes a marionette to Kun’s music. The lyrics manipulate him and the tempo becomes his companion, his puppeteer.
The chorus comes and Ten opens his eyes, gaze locking on Kun and he thinks this is when Ten is the most graceful, when he sees his own reflection in the other’s eyes, a version so different from what he sees in the mirror—hopeful and content and loved.
Fragments soar like sparks with every movement of Ten, the temperature in the practice room going higher and higher and higher and Kun can almost smell the smoke as the movement of his fingers on the piano gain tempo, voice singing louder and threatening to crack, and he feels the heat even through the soles of his shoes.
Ten spins and soon the heat grows into a fire that turns everything into ashes, the walls and the squeaky floor and the bright lights, unspoken doubts and answers that will never make sense anyway. They’re just two people in this world and Ten dances only for him, and it’s beautiful and romantic and broken in the fucked up kind of way, like he’s attempting to put their pieces back together, cutting his fingers on the shards, only to realize that enough scraps have been lost and they’ll never fit like how they used to.
This harmony is Ten’s, though, and as the blazing light glimmers in eyes that meet Kun’s he sees the other’s own flaws beneath the shadows that make him look unearthly, supernatural—a being that’s too beautiful to be true.
And then the song ends and Ten stops, soft pants escaping his lips and shoulders trembling. The flames die slowly and the smoke dissipates and the world rights itself and Kun can breathe again.
Kun’s fingertips hover above the piano tiles, gaze traveling over every part of the mostly empty practice room. He doesn’t look at him but he knows Ten is watching him, quietly observing the slightest shift in his expression and listening to his every breath, waiting. He doesn’t look at him, but he still feels his presence in the room and it’s enough to suffocate him.
“Kun,” he says, echoing within the four walls of the practice room like a distant call.
He turns to him then, and Ten is looking at him as if he’s the only one he wants to see, and he hears that Ten loves him even before Ten’s lips part and form the words.