( /he rubs his chin, fingers brushing over the rough bristles of his stubble ) You look like you've broken quite a few hearts. ( /and he swears it's a compliment, because if you had the power to break a person's heart, you had something stronger than bullets and explosives, so that wasn't exactly bad in his dictionary )
oh? (/ raises an eyebrow, interested by his word choice — usually, when one complimented yoona, they would talk about something corporeal, her nose, her eyes, hell, even her eyebrows.
but this boy, this kid, knew what he was talking about. love was a powerful force; aphrodite knew of it, hera knew of it, even the grey-eyed athena knew of its power.
so yoona was happy with this compliment ) thank you. (/ she neither cares about where he came from nor where he was to go after this, all she cared about was her ego power )
“so tell me about it,” yixing says, shifting a little so he can prop his head on jongin’s shoulder at a more comfortable angle.
he’s lying down on the single mattress in his room, jongin’s arm around his shoulders, holding him close, languidly stroking his hair and looking at him through half-lidded eyes. yixing leans his face towards him a little more to feel the warm push of his breath on his forehead, he thinks of leaning back to look at him but he doesn’t.
and jongin feels as if he’s missed something again because neither of them has said anything for the last half hour. “about what?” he asks.
“about…” yixing trails off, eyes glued on empty air. he’s watching each frame of this moment pass by but he’s not paying attention, all he can feel is jongin’s fingers in his hair and he lets his eyes flutter close. yixing heaves a sigh, what he was about to say completely slipping his mind.
when he opens his eyes, it turns out he’s had them closed for a little too long. he gets up all of a sudden, looks around, out his window, at his door, as if he’s looking for something, someone—he seems startled for a moment but then he calms down.
there’s no stutter in his movements when he lies back down and assumes his previous position, just propping himself up on his elbow this time and cupping jongin’s face—and he kisses him.
yixing’s lips are surprisingly cold but soft, and jongin wants to taste more, to feel more, and he’s never really been shy so he pulls yixing closer with the the arm he already has snaked around his torso.
he’s intrigued by how yixing seems to want to get closer to his body too, but decides not to at the last moment, clutching at the front of his shirt instead.
yixing frees himself from jongin’s hold and slowly climbs his body, settling himself on his thighs, bent legs on either side and knees pressing into the mattress, before leaning down and letting their lips meet again.
it’s almost involuntary how they move—the next second, jongin’s sitting up with a very eager yixing on his lap, his hands continuously stroking up and down the other’s sides, and yixing presses himself flush against him as they tentatively sneak up under his shirt to roam over his bare skin.
yixing isn’t completely aware of what he’s doing when he pulls away slightly to tug those hands to the waistband of his jeans but he does it, and jongin moves to fumble with the button of yixing’s jeans as their lips move effortlessly with each other in that perpetual kiss—
but yixing abruptly stops.
he catches himself.
he’s getting carried away.
“you’re crying,” jongin says, stating a fact, and he reaches up to brush away a tear falling from yixing’s eye with his thumb.
yixing seems taken aback by this, but it doesn’t show on his face. he doesn’t make a move to wipe away the tears or stop them either. he’s not sobbing, he’s not crying. he’s just reaching a hand up to cover the one resting on his cheek—jongin’s—and he slips his fingers in between the spaces, and everything seems forgotten.
“i have somewhere to show you,” yixing says in sweet anticipation, and jongin wants to protest but he doesn’t.
he just thinks about what it could possibly be and how out of the blue it all is—but things with yixing are always sort of like that.
yixing gets off of him, he gets up and pulls on a flimsy jacket and a pair of his faded chucks. and jongin moves too.
they’re all set and ready to go out into the starless night in no time and yixing takes his hand, stopping again before turning the knob of his door.
he turns to jongin, looks at him the way jongin’s looked at him so many times, like it’s the last time he’ll see him—and there’s sentimentality in yixing’s eyes as he hides them beneath closed lids and just leans forward to press his lips against jongin’s again.
the kiss is sweet and chaste and yixing smiles right after, before he opens his door and steps out with jongin—only jongin can’t.
he finds himself trapped in yixing’s room and yixing’s right there, barely inches away from him.
yixing stares with blank eyes as jongin watches the backdrop of the hallway change into the familiar walls of the brotherhood and he’s much too intelligent to not know what’s going on.
yixing is on the other side, blinking, looking on, bright brown eyes completely blank and void of emotion or even their usual wonder. he’s looking at jongin and he’s looking at his room change—everything disappears and turns into white.
yixing watches. he watches and he wonders and he doesn’t understand why he can’t feel anything.
a hand on his shoulder temporarily pulls him out of his own head, and he looks up to see dongwook.
they didn’t tell him what the reason was when they gave him this mission—or maybe they did tell him but he just missed it—and he realized that he didn’t really care.
hearing jongin’s name and what he had to do to him should have made him panic, should have pushed him into suicidal rebellion or something equally dramatic but it didn’t.
somehow, they found a way to extract the chaos his heart had been injected with and for the first time in years, he was able to freely manipulate his ability again.
just this once, they told him. but that was enough.
he didn’t know if their chosen method of killing was a) unoriginal or b) completely lame, but he didn’t really think about it and he just watched as an invisible gas escaped the holes in the walls—and he’s completely aware that he’s the one doing it all.
he hears a kettle sigh its way into a boil as jongin’s breath whistles in the top of his lungs—he feels everything jongin feels.
the pain is suddenly there, like cotton thread being yanked through airways, the whistling gets louder, the hot red streaks begin to splinter across his vision and he watches jongin fall to the ground on his hands and knees.
every second passes him by but yixing doesn’t remember if he saw jongin gulping for oxygen or if he just accepted it all freely—all he knows is that after a few minutes, he’s standing right there at the open doorway, and he’s looking at jongin’s body lying on the ground, like a speck of dirt in the perfect whiteness of everything, head tipped back, beautiful thick lips that yixing had once kissed closed, silent, staring at the ceiling with unblinking eyes that will never blink again like a tourist in the sistine chapel.
yixing watches, and his emotions are coming in waves inside of him but he doesn’t feel them—he should be breaking down now but he remains blank, and he’s just looking at jongin. observing. studying. trying to understand and feeling like a child because he just can’t piece it all together.
making sense of right now is like trying to understand radio waves, or imagining computers communicating along glass cables.
only when dongwook’s hand has left his shoulder does it dawn upon yixing that jongin is dead,
and he forgets all the gentle touches and the rough kisses and the light chuckles and the stolen glances and the feeling of skin on skin and the moonlight bleeding through the canopy, cold winds, bamboo and beds of moss and poorly lit motel rooms and dark city streets and spoken desires of remembering—he forgets and he doesn’t feel anything.
loyalty comes over everything else.
rules often had exceptions but just not this one.
yixing looks at the body lying on the ground of that sickly white room a couple of feet away from him, and he wonders who it is—was.
he wonders if he knew him, he wonders if he mattered, he wonders who jongin is—was—because the name keeps echoing in his head but he doesn’t know a jongin.
sometimes yixing wondered why he joined the brotherhood. he didn't have some scarred past like most of the people he spent more than twenty-four hours a day of his life with. no damaged family or lonely home. no sob story, really. nothing too depressing or eventful--just a boy who lived alone in the mountains with his mother who passed away of sickness when he was eighteen. not exactly something that would drive someone to join a terrorist group dedicated to mutant supremacy and world domination--to put it in yixing's words.
he thought about all of this as he walked down one of the brotherhood's many lit--but still strangely dark--halls. and he kept on thinking about days, moments, and afternoons that had happened and haden't taken place, revisiting his memories and those that didn't belong to him, remembering names and seeing places he's never heard of or known, and soon enough he was thinking thoughts that weren't even his own.
and he almost walked into a wall because of it.
his head snapped back into reality just in time. and he blinked, took a breath as if he had been deprived of oxygen, took one sweet lungful of it in before going through a pair of open doors and turning the corner he needed to take so he could reach his room.
(classic yixing. walking down a hallway, letting thoughts that aren't even his own take over his head because his mind was bored and his mind didn't do bored.)
he should really move into some city soon, he thought as he padded down another corridor, the white rubber soles of his shoes quiet. soundless. look for a nice roommate, he thought. a nice place. maybe an apartment on the fourth or seventh floor of some building anywhere but heukyang. split the rent. make noodles. have a house that smells like sauteed garlic and personal scents. and it was all so exciting to think of. (clearly, yixing's life lacked just that: excitement.)
he tried his best to clear his head.
it was a normal day, and he was just on his way to get some books from under his bed then he'd go back to the lab. back to his work. back to normality.
but things are never really one hundred percent the way we would like them to be.
