Work Text:
keep me yours so the seas won't tear us apart
There’s something unfathomable in the way August’s haze drifts over the city with its earliest dusty specks in the rosy, bashful blush of dawn. The air lingers heavy on the balconies of the downtown’s golden-trimmed, ruinous tenement houses and it breezes its path balmily across the floors of the house, leaving Jaejoong feeling dazed. His head falls back light between soft pillows, lids quivering as sunshine fills his mind in that fleeting moment the curtains greet the wind – a delicate, creamy vanilla whirlpool drawing the drapes a tad higher along the bedecked windowsill. He’s not completely awake yet; his dream is seeping away with the muffled bumble of the cars and the rattling rails of the tram blooming past the corner that rounds close enough for him to reach just within a perfect time-spectrum of five minutes when he’s leaving for work in the dewy morning, but still quite far to cause a bother in late peak hours at midnight.
Jaejoong rolls over to his side and faces a tanned back through the black strands of his hair fallen into his eyes. The ivory sheets melt into the bareness of golden-brown skin in perfect contrast; summer’s palettes create the most gorgeous complexions.
Changmin – the name rushes over him like electricity, stinging his nerves warm and pleasantly.
Jaejoong’s gaze traces the familiar, barely visible little scars, eyes shifting from a long neck to jutting shoulder-blades and all of a sudden, he’s hit by the sweet recognition of yesterday night – it had been raining all evening and when, with a clamorous thud as the old, wooden front door opened and closed, Changmin finally returned to their flat, hair and body a soaking wet, and Jaejoong watched him and laughed at him staining the floor all around the room with his dribbling footsteps until the younger got fed up and Jaejoong wasn’t laughing anymore. And he can still recall it, hanging on the tip of his tongue and stuck in the back of his throat, just how amazing Changmin’s wet kisses felt, his big lips fretting against Jaejoong’s own, his skin and curled locks damp and tickling the way down from his jaw to his chest as passion took over and the two of them sunk low on the hard ground. Their clothes lay ruffled around them like the crumpled columns of last month’s gazettes in the kitchen so often do; a habit of both of theirs, to spend brunches and lunch-times with newspaper in their hands, their fingers folding amorphous shapes of all undiscernible kinds with letters stolen from a coffee-stained spread’s inky alphabet signs. Changmin’s dress shirt, the only piece of clothing that had stayed on him, was still a bit drenched – the soft cotton traced his twitching abdomen and the muscles in his loving arms so wantonly, and Jaejoong’s heart palpitated to an erratic tempo of thrilling pain and pleasure, wanting the roughness of Changmin’s velvety skin hale all over him again.
“The neighbours are going to hear us,” Changmin whispered in a warning tone of mixed compliance and obedience. He looked so captivating, Jaejoong thought, a splayed bemusement on his face as he lay there spent and dazed from the aftershock of his orgasm. In these elusive moments, he always seemed fragile, almost like a doll, almost like a puppy, with the eyes of a doe and the miens of a lost child. Jaejoong knew he couldn’t resist the promise of another round, no matter how denying his words sounded. It’d always been like that. Changmin would first seemingly decline, but his complains would soon turn into keen begs and pleas. “And it’s not- You aren’t going to keep quiet if we do it again…”
“I am” Jaejoong promised, cooing gently, almost as though Changmin were a baby. “I’ll stay quiet, I swear.”
“No” it escaped the younger in a form of a sigh, tone soft and thrilled and Jaejoong could hear his voice fading into a lull as his tight, long lashes closed in a flutter over his hooded eyes. The musky scent of sex idled over his heaving chest, dripping low with sweet sweat beads on his abdomen, his come sticking shimmery along his jutting hips and deep navel.
“Stop that, mon chéri.” Jaejoong turned to his side, his arm against the cold floor in support, and reached out to touch Changmin. As his cold fingertips brushed his stiff shoulder, the younger winced, lips quivering and cheeks flushing a rosy wild red. “Don’t you want me?”
Changmin’s breath hitched. Of course he wanted Jaejoong.
“Fuck that, hyung.” It’d taken a while, to get Changmin lured into calling Jaejoong hyung – the older had always mocked him, dearly and gently, for not speaking his native tongue, the one Jaejoong had longed to hear again for so sickeningly long– Changmin had rebelled against his wants at first, not understanding what Jaejoong had felt; it had bothered him for a while, but he’d have soon get used to the way his lips form the words of a language he’d never ever known.
“Changmin,” the whisper wafted over Changmin’s throat, ripping his thick lips of a breaking moan. “Fuck me, baby, come on– “
There was a soiree resided a floor below them, Jaejoong had noticed the melody of silky piano music seeping slowly through the house. Changmin’s heart beat against his chest to the rhythm of a trilling, lewd waltz and Jaejoong pulled his hot body tight back to his own, rocking a rough tempo over the flattened pile of their ripped clothes as their lips bit kisses heavy and hard with lust over one another’s thirsting mouths.
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It’s always hard to separate after a night spent tangled in each other’s arms. Jaejoong feels the sunbeams grow warmer on the small of his back and he knows it’s time he woke Changmin and his own self up.
Changmin tastes salty when Jaejoong rubs his dry lips against his goldenly glowing skin. The tip of his tongue sweeps over beading sweat-drops in the crook of the younger’s neck, his lips eating up Changmin’s scent – a curious mélange of a summery, honeydew-like sweetness and the dreaming remnants from a long-faded, peachy shampoo reminiscing yesterday’s shower molten with the stinging flavour of desire. Jaejoong loves the way Changmin smells these mornings, still so frayed from their little night-time tryst and still a bit high amidst the clouds; the fragrance of their dripping love lingers thick like honey on his body. It vanishes soon, though, leaving tanginess musing with the air around the open room.
The bed smells like Changmin when he finally slips out from under the sheets, dressing up quickly with a steaming mug in one hand, getting ready to leave for work. Jaejoong watches him cover his breathtaking nakedness – his eyes are glued to the place on his abdomen where his navel connects to his loins in a line of dark hair. Changmin has been reluctant to shave it ever since Jaejoong had offered to help him with it, but he doesn’t mind– It thrills him, somehow, in a strangely enticing, arousing way.
The younger’s shadow is gone in no time, but his coffee kisses lounge languidly over Jaejoong’s yearning mouth.
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A door is thrusted open wide to the broad, beige walls trimming the corridor – a burnished line of chair rail in elegant golden running along left and right – and Jaejoong can smell a keen scent of paint seeping from inside when he steps out their dusty doorway. He’s carrying a basket burdening of dirty, long-worn clothes, linen trousers in pastel shades, white dress shirts with collars à la mode, black socks jolted inside-out and a moulding pile of greying underwear; the laundry that’s usually left for him to collect, garnishing an hour from his very precious every Thursday afternoon ever since he’d decided to move in there with a then viciously young and capricious, long-lashed and angel-faced Changmin.
Things have since then changed, Jaejoong muses over his thoughts as he’s downing the marblish, steep steps around the stairway. If nothing – Changmin’s seraphic smiles have become somewhat impure, his teeth still a blinding white but his lips a tad more tinted with wine.
And oh, those rosy twilights shared over summer wine! The memories sting like sour cherry does when it pops lushly in the mouth, and the flurry of olden visions has Jaejoong sojourning lost in thought by the lobed leaves of a philodendron planted in a lovely, cracked pot on the fourth floor. He remembers, so suddenly, scenes dripping with amour – the day they first met, that technicolour sunset, Changmin being much like a child and himself a lone voyager, sailing high in a world atop the billowing clouds, of which the mistiest mingle coast in to oceans– Jaejoong had never imagined it would turn out to be such a reckless garçonnet to pull his dazzled head down back to earth from his choking, imaginary cosmos floating amidst vibrant skies. But the younger tamed him, and Jaejoong was bold enough to tame him too, with all the love and tenderness his heart contained for no one but a buoyant, young soul just perfectly akin to what Changmin’s body bore.
That summer’s long vanished now, buried into a drawer frothing over by the past five years’ niggling memorabilia and Jaejoong recalls Changmin a crimson flower in flight, sticking to his chest like le drapeau tricolore and staining his heart a very loving hue of rosé wine. And then, memories start to flood him – his bare back, his first drunken kiss, his cutting jaw and chiselled arm -, but he’s soon shaken out of his daydream as a neighbour, a young French beauté passes him by. The girl greets Jaejoong with a sultry smile, cheap perfume lingering in her wake, her auburn ringlets lashing against satin with every step she takes whilst she’s drifting farther and farther away into the half-light.
He only notices the potted plant then, after being swept out of the sea of his thoughts. Changmin would always complain about them skimming over him so abruptly, whenever he used the stairs instead of the elevator, but Jaejoong has always quite fancied the way their leaves paint dancing flocks of colourful shades on the peeling rails that fence each dust-pathed stairway right down to the first floor.
The sun is already setting in a stunning glaze of the richest strawberry pink and tangerine light when he leaves the last steps of the stairstall behind. It’s only a few more now to pass to get down the areaway. The basement had been renovated just a year before they moved in, and the landlord had opted for a change in its usage – now it’s serving as a common laundry room, equipped with a long row of tall and silverly shining washing machines, costing only a few dirty nickels per cycle.
An artful hand had planted flowers all over the dim room in the basement and Jaejoong’s lips are lacquered with a golden smile as his gaze lounges on the brilliant green hanging from the top of each big machine, leaves fresh and lively and raining soft petals whenever a sudden waft of breeze skims past their svelte stems. The shelf right above one of the chairs – a plastic red pushed back to the wall on the left – resides a radio that plays French and American melodies alongside occasional breaks of news and advertisements. It’s singing a syrupy lullaby now that Jaejoong barely knows the tune of, yet soon, he catches himself humming along to each beat of the song, the rhythm matching the clamour leaking from the washing machine’s silver tumbler.
There isn’t much to do while the cycle’s being done, so Jaejoong sits down under the radio and listens to the sound with closed eyes. It feels like he’s soaring top of the clouds – the song soothes him like nothing else does, but it’s way too soon before the verses are shattering apart and a hoarse tone is delivering news he doesn’t want to hear about.
There’s an advertisement that catches his attention – a voyage across the globe, a journey roaming from West to East, from North to South, a matchless adventure to rinse your soul. He thinks about it, how he used to travel, before he settled down to stay with Changmin, an oasis along the coast of beautiful Europe reminding him of his long-missed Korean home.
Changmin has never left the country, and Jaejoong knows it’s been bothering him for a while. He’s always been amazed by the polaroids the older had taken with his old kodak, painting worlds he’s never seen before in the most alluring colours ever mimickingly made. Changmin wants to travel, Jaejoong recalls a lot of times he’s said that, and he want to show him all the places Jaejoong feels he’d just perfectly belong in. He wants to take him home first, though, and maybe, when it gets better, they’ll be able to return, but he’s not sure whether Changmin would like to see Korea.
It’s strange, how it all makes such a difference – Changmin has never called anyplace but France his home.
Perhaps they’ll see the world one day. Jaejoong doesn’t know just yet.
Whatever the future brings, he will, at least, always be able to feel at ease when he’s with Changmin, no matter where caprice drifts him and his undying, petite love.