Work Text:
Re: 05.02.17
It had taken weeks to coordinate this.
Just three hours on a remote beach. A backpack full of fruit and kimchi and gimbaps and a half case of soju. Sand-colored beach towels. A wide mouthed cave to contain it all—more inconspicuous than an umbrella. Red wine and sweet rice cakes and him.
And me.
Alone.
Maybe six weeks of us building up the courage to ask Namjoon, and it had taken at least another month for him to be convinced enough to even mention it to Sejin-hyung.
Laying there at last, watching him pan for shells along the shoreline, chasing him into the tide as it rose, tossing one and then another empty soju bottle into the sand, I breathed in for what felt like the first time in years. Drunk on his endless peals of laughter, the gentle shh shh of the waves. It was transcendent like only one other thing ever was, somehow just as profound as the roar of the stage, and I was so alive I could die.
So present that time slowed, then froze altogether.
Every second, a fond expression of forever.
And it was enough.
~
“Ah. Finally!”
He plopped down into the sand beside me with a great huff, and I glanced up from the minor edits I was doing to my last few shots. “Done, babe?” I asked.
“Mhm. I love it, but it’s too hot out there.”
“Want some fruit? There’s still a few grapes left…”
“Please.”
The camera slipped from my hands with both intentionality and haste, and I was turning to dig through the stacks of borrowed Tupperware for said promised grapes. He slid into the groove of my splayed legs, my phone in his hand because he was worse about checking than me and could never help himself. It was already unlocked, in fact, and he was thumbing through our Twitter account.
Shaking my head, I chuckled. “Open, babe.”
Ahh…
One and then another piece of fruit slipped from my fingers to his lips. I watched him lick away the juice with the tip of his tongue, stared until I realized he was watching me stare, a smirk starting at the corners of his mouth. The flirt.
“Kiss me hello,” he demanded.
“Hello?” I laughed. “I’ve been with you for the last two and a half hours, bae.”
“…So, you want to kiss me goodbye then?”
Never.
His lips were sweet and sticky with grape juice, warm from how long he had spent in the sun. One or both of us was humming into the sensation of reconnecting, and it tickled at the spark of arousal tip-toeing pleasantly up my neck.
We had really needed this.
“God, I’ve missed you, baby.” The words came out like fire, tugged at the pit of my stomach like his hand winding its way into my hair. “I’m loving the tour, but it’s been so long since we’ve had time like this.”
I nodded, leaning over him to press a barely-there kiss into his forehead.
“Your appa called while you were shell hunting,” I murmured into his skin.
“Ah.” He sighed, and the soft sound made me almost regret saying anything at all. “He’s still worried about me then.”
“Yeah.”
He nodded at nothing and sank into the cradle of my chest, his thumbs moving once again across the screen of my cell phone. “Did you talk to him?”
“Mm…Just a little.”
“…Were you nervous?”
“Maybe…”
He chuckled, and even as I felt myself heat with embarrassment, I melted at the sound. “Baby. You know he loves hearing from you,” he said.
“I know. I…I’m working on it.”
Again, his chest shook with fond mirth, and I flushed deeper, pulled him in closer, with both of my arms squeezing about his middle. “Don’t laugh at me.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“Okay, maybe I am. You’re just so cute, baby.”
I buried my face in the side of his neck—Inhale—My nose twitched at those hints of ocean spray and faded sunscreen dissolving into his skin. Looking over the crown of his head was the mouth of our alcove and, beyond that, the endless crystal blue-orange of a sea verging on dusk. Cloudless and golden. And he was warm, so warm in my arms.
“ARMYs seem excited for the shows next week,” he sighed into the quiet.
I kissed at his shoulder, exhaled into the scent of him on my tongue. “Babe?”
“Hm?”
“Can I show you something?”
“Of course.”
I reached for the camera again with one hand, drew it forward until it was in front of us both, pressed play on one of my more recent shots.
The subject was him, of course—always him—from only a few hours ago when he was wading shin-deep in the shallows for shells. The camera trailed behind in my hand, capturing a quiet scene at first: the water, the gentle hush of our feet as we moved within the waves, then the shot zoomed in for a close-up of his face and hands as he bent forward, reaching into the sea. A broad smile flashed back towards the camera and, for a moment, the quiet shattered into aborted joy: Look, I found one—Ah! What are you doing out here with that? What if you drop it?!
He chuckled into my arm as he watched the scolding from the first of our three hours play out once more on the small screen. “You’re truly fortunate to have such good luck…I mean, management really would have killed you if you had dropped this thing into the ocean…”
I nodded, felt my cheeks lift as the scene shifted to a close-up of what had been discovered moments before. Isn’t it beautiful? The shot pivoted smoothly to capture me planting a kiss on his cheek, him meeting me for another of our lips, and then a handful of seconds of us simply beaming into each other’s faces, a stray sunbeam glinting into the shot before it went dark altogether.
“You’re getting much better,” he said after a while.
I swallowed hard.
“It’s…It’s too bad you’ll have to delete it.”
Just like I had deleted all the others, right? Countless pictures and videos of us that were too risky and too dangerous to exist in this world.
Or so we had been told.
I swallowed again.
“What if I didn’t though?”
There was a heartbeat or two of pause, and then, with a soft breath, he was turning in my arms, shifting and bending himself until he was seated in my lap, our legs gritty with damp sand and tangling into a knot in the towel. He cradled my chin in his hands, stared and studied my face, my eyes, as if each feature was somehow new, every pore a marvel. There was a sorrow in his eyes that felt like a reflection.
I prepared myself.
“What do you mean, baby?” he asked, massaging at my jaw with his thumbs. “Our contract was just revised. We…We’ve talked about this.”
“I know. And I think it was a mistake,” I whispered the words into his palms. “It’s not fair to ask us to give this up anymore, hyung.”
He winced, scooted even closer to me, knotted us both further into the towel and the sand and the damp. “Baby, they’re just videos—”
“No, they’re not just videos, hyung.” I could almost feel the truth of the words surging through my voice. “They’re not just videos, and they’re not the same as what we get through the company. This is about us and our memories as us. Something that’s actually real, no matter how hard we pretend all the time that it’s not. I mean, we can be a secret to everyone else for the rest of our lives if we have to be, but I want us to be real to us. I want videos from our first trip alone together and when we move into our first place, pictures that we can maybe frame someday and laugh at when our parents or our hyungs come over to visit, you know? I…I want there to be proof somewhere in the world that…that we…that our relationship was real and it was beautiful and that it was ours, babe…Don’t we deserve that much?”
~
Three hours alone on an island on the edge of the Pacific. A plastic tarp to keep the sand out of my camera bag. Jimin’s clutch of shells, most of them destined to be a thank you to Namjoon for daring to ask in the first place. Empty Tupperware. A soju bottle, a scribbled message rolled away inside it, all buried elbow-deep in the sand.
I just love you so much.
Three hours to two to one.
And then dusk.
He didn’t say anything more about it.
He leaned into my sternum, and there we swayed like a single wave through the sunset. I told him about all of the memories that had, in fact, not been deleted over the last couple of years, about the pictures I had saved on my father’s computer back home in Busan, about the text messages I had backed up there as well along with the dozens of videos also long ago saved from obscurity.
He cried and then he laughed, slapping at my shoulder and scolding me for keeping it all a secret for so long.
Just as the sky clung to every hint of bruised gold before the inevitable night, we squeezed at every second that passed through our fingers. Stretched every one until they were endless continuations of those that had come before.
Until Hobi-hyung’s voice called out to us from just beyond our little haven and summoned us back into the world where we were known.
~