Three | Insanity | Jongho
Space-Hair | SHINee oneshot collectionNobody had ever actually told Minho the true definition of insanity.
As a young boy, he'd grown up to believe that insanity was measured by how many people you'd murdered (his great grandfather had fallen victim to the knife of a cut-throat farmer with overdue debts, and his family-line had forever been hardened by the circumstance). However, the more he grew, and the more he heard about his great grandfather – a man who practically deserved the knife’s sharp blade in the end – this theory had grown of less worth; normal men killed normal men and insane men killed insane men and it was just the cyclic nature of life, regardless of how zany you seemed from birth. Once in tranquillity, a maths teacher would teach maths, but in distress, he'd teach massacres so macabre one’s body jarred at the idea. It seemed suitable to Minho then that he would leave this notion on its hospital bed, all strung up in a straight-jacket, like the supposedly insane.
He'd considered that maybe insanity was defined by psychopathy and sociopathy. People who were categorically insane never seemed to have a direct link to their emotions – at least, that’s what Minho had learned from the plethora of horror films he'd indulged in over the previous few Halloweens – and so were tethered instead to a world where people didn’t have emotions. They had faces and arms and legs and hair and a brain that (mis)calculated the next appropriate movement, but emotions were sparse and fleeting, and weren’t required when one had to make a decision.
However, Minho soon discovered that not everyone who was pledged as suffering from insanity was emotionless. In fact, he discovered quite the opposite.
Minho had first met Kim Jonghyun at one of those dreary coffee shops designed to keep out the rain with panelled windows and draw in the customers with the cheap-looking pastries on display. It was the type of coffee shop you went to when you couldn’t afford the cosmopolitan, and only had enough money for a greying coffee and a browse at a week-old newspaper. Most of those who actually enjoyed the blackboard signs and the cracked tiles of the café were pensioners too stubborn to venture anywhere other than the good ol’ coffee shop of their golden hay-day, where the coffee flowed like liquor and their wads of cash paid for more than just an over-priced beverage (they could have a slice of carrot cake too, if they were lucky).
Jonghyun had been sitting in the corner on one of those all-too-common rainy days, and he'd been holding a stare so pensive Minho had to do a double-take. When in public, a man’s demeanour was normally reserved, something reflected in all the other customers as they tampered with their magazines or with the busy city-view outside – but not Jonghyun’s. It was as if he'd stumbled across one of the cockroaches the café was infamous for keeping stored behind its walls, and he was inspecting it with the undue grace of a ravenous vulture. It'd intrigued Minho.
Jonghyun was pensive because he was reading a book, and not just a dusty paperback with a rigid spine and dog-eared pages, but a heavy hardback, with no titles, no author-names, no penmanship to speak of. Minho knew it wasn’t likely, but the book was so candidly morbid all he could compare it to was a loathing book of death. If the book were of death then the man holding it was too – not that the brunette-haired male looked anything akin to the Grim Reaper, except, maybe, for the fact he was drowned in black. A black hoodie, to be precise.
Minho was unsure why he'd approached the curious man. Maybe it was his furrowed brow or the fact that they'd both ordered the same – a strong coffee, to wash away the winter chill and glares of those around them – but Minho had found himself hooked into the stranger as if his fingers were gripping Minho’s pages and not the book’s. A short hello had led to a conversation which had led to Minho’s discovery that Kim Jonghyun most certainly wasn’t a normal guy. He was more run-of-the-mill than those the darkest corners of a psychiatric ward housed, but his entire raison d'être (his words, certainly not Minho’s) had been the large book he clung to tightly and the inspiration it provided him. As Minho had talked to him, his eyes had also flitted – right, left, right, left – as if a paranoid scampering for cover, but Minho knew Jonghyun couldn’t hide beneath the round tables. That would have been, well, absurd.
Minho and Jonghyun had bonded after this. The flowery nuisance of Jonghyun’s language and the broad manliness of Minho’s had sparked a cataclysm between both men. They were two supernovae on different courses that somehow became shunted together, but it had, inexplicably, worked.
It hadn’t surprised Minho to find out that Kim Jonghyun was a writer. Writers were often odd folk, Minho believed. At least, the good ones were. He wasn’t much of a reader and could succumb easier to an action romp on the box-screen than a yawing thriller in a few pages, but he admired their craft; his cousin had been a writer, and she'd worked freelance until she'd died one day, life consumed by her writings until the breath had left her. She'd also been a temporary insomniac and a sufferer from bipolar, but that had been irrelevant, Minho supposed, for not all writers were mentally ill.
Not all.
Kim Jonghyun liked to write fantasy novels, but also romance novels, and short stories, and westerns, and poetry. He dabbled, flitting between ideas quicker than a rat between unkempt heaps of rubbish, always hunting for the perfect packet, the break that would launch him into ‘stardom’. Minho had read Jonghyun’s work, and although he'd mumbled something about how it was surely good enough to be published, he hadn’t actually understood the cryptic message behind the poem. He'd seen flamboyant words and ethereal imagery and the poem had a quality only matched by the known greats, but he hadn’t made sense of it. To Minho, it was just another string of endless thoughts, conjoined under the hood of spidery italics and a spiralling mind.
So that’s why Minho was shocked when Jonghyun had invited him on a date. He wasn’t the writer-community’s type. He had no wealth of knowledge on Shakespeare or Hardy, and still didn’t know his Emily Dickinson from his Charles Dickinson, but Jonghyun had invited him out for a romantic meal nonetheless, unfazed by the younger’s lack of literary genius.
During that meal, Minho had uncovered that Jonghyun also had a dog, and he didn’t like loud people very much so was unsure why he liked Minho, and that he detested meat, not out of any humanitarian mission, rather the taste upset him, and so he was a vegetarian. Minho had taken all of this in with a steady nod, Jonghyun’s reverent rambling scoring through any intimacy the date could have conjured. In the ambient restaurant there was no hand-touching, no flirtations, just Jonghyun asking Minho about how football worked and why he couldn’t get the lightbulb in his flat to glow. Minho hadn’t minded, however, because Jonghyun had then invited Minho back to his flat (which was small and cluttered in mindless tat that would've driven Minho to abandoning the relationship were it anyone else) and had asked him to fix his lightbulb. Minho obliged, and Jonghyun had watched with two wide, adoring eyes, and that had made Minho feel really, really wholesome, more so than a sweet lady’s freshly baked pie.
He'd stolen a kiss before leaving and had ventured home, only to see the writer the next day, and the next, and the next, until they officialised their status and Jonghyun began to work on his first novel, something about a man's man who liked football and cars and beer and being obnoxious, and a feminine writer who liked spiders and small things and tall things like Minho. It'd all been going so well, until Jonghyun had decided it would be a good idea to start talking to his wall.
Minho had dismissed it as habitual behaviour. A vast myriad of people talked to themselves, about shopping or equations or their new favourite song, but this was different. Minho would walk into their shared apartment to hear Jonghyun tittering happily to himself, giddy as if he'd heard the funniest joke. The television was never on, however, and they didn’t own a radio. Unless he'd been laughing at his own writing – which was unlikely unless in detest at it, for Jonghyun was his own harshest critic – he'd been laughing at simply nothing, and this disturbed Minho.
Jonghyun also started to lose interest in . Not that Minho was a demanding or superficial man, but at times he longed for Jonghyun to satiate his cravings, yet the elder never obliged. In the earlier throes of their romance, Minho had been able to pound into Jonghyun as if the following morning was already a memory, and, if he'd been feeling really desperate, Jonghyun had been able to ride out his agonising lust within Minho, until the younger couldn’t stand and was unable to contemplate moving.
But this intimacy had vanished quicker than it had appeared.
Jonghyun didn’t like having , for he felt they were under a watchful gaze. Minho had laughed this off with every advance, mumbling God doesn't look when we anyway, but Jonghyun had shook his head. He didn’t mean God, didn’t mean him at all, and this unnerved Minho. When Minho suggested moving apartments together, Jonghyun declined, and whenever Minho attempted to understand who Jonghyun felt was watching them, the writer would turn to his unorganised palace and bury himself in his computer-screen again.
This upset Minho. It upset him greatly.
He hadn’t been keen to assign the young man to an asylum. Nobody ever wanted doctors prodding at the ones they loved, scanning through every inch of their veins like they were searching for the colour of amethyst that sparked there, but it didn’t take long for Minho’s other options to run dry. He'd confronted Jonghyun and had been met with nothing but seven shattered plates and a dog that growled defensively every time Minho tried to enter Jonghyun’s private study, and he'd also tried to understand Jonghyun, but had been met with the reiterated mantra: You don't really want to understand, Minho, and you never will!
So, reluctantly, two years and three months into their relationship (Minho never forgot to time-keep), he let his resolve fade. Amidst tears that clogged the back of his throat and hitched every exhalation like the laces that tied one’s shoes together, Minho had made an appointment for his lover. The knot in his stomach wouldn’t untangle and the tremor in his voice wouldn’t subside, and all he could feel was the guttural fear that maybe, just maybe, his boyfriend was riddled by insanity.
It'd been a Thursday afternoon, the appointment. Not too early in the week to dampen its remainder and not too late to act as the off-guard crescendo. Minho had lied to Jonghyun. He'd never lied to him before, but that day, he'd masked a simple afternoon date over the harrowing judges of doctors and nurses. Jonghyun had thought they were going out for ice-cream. For a quaint walk in the park beneath a halo of luminescent sunlight, hand-in-hand, silhouettes that melted into night as would their ice-cream in the sunlight… The perfect afternoon, a false reality shattered as soon as Minho had pulled that godawful four-wheel drive of his into the hospital carpark.
Jonghyun hadn't left the car at first. He'd sat, impertinently, arms folded with an odd expression on his face, for, in his own eyes, there wasn’t a bloody thing wrong. Minho had coaxed him, said that if there wasn't a bloody thing wrong then not a bloody thing would happen and so, as if to prove he wasn’t insane and to end the horrid affair, Jonghyun had ambled out of the car. He hadn’t looked at Minho, hadn’t spoken to Minho, and had only cast a teary-eyed look at his own scuffed shoes. This wasn’t exposure to Kim Jonghyun, this was betrayal.
Minho had expected a classic encounter, but he supposed he really had indulged too heavily on all those horror films the previous few Halloweens. The room had been a ward and the nurse had been awfully efficient, but the doctor was kind and endearing and seemed overtly interested in Jonghyun’s writing. Minho had sat in a plastic chair, staring blankly at the minimalism of the ward; it was nothing but white walls and white equipment and a white bed that Jonghyun dangled his legs from with his skin just as pale. Minho’s eyes had been rimmed red the entirety of the encounter, on the verge of tears that couldn’t quite fall, not if he wanted his dignity intact. Here, Jonghyun seemed normal. Jonghyun was the man he'd fallen in love with.
After the minor tests and the shrift nod from the nurse with the bright red lips, Jonghyun had been taken away for further questions, some kind of psycho-analysis, and Minho had also been questioned as well, telling the efficient nurse (for the kind doctor had retreated elsewhere with Jonghyun) everything he knew. He'd told her that Jonghyun talked to a specific wall in their apartment and that his moods fluctuated quicker than the decision made with a flipped coin, which reminded him of his bipolar cousin from years ago, and the nurse had nodded, biting her bright red lips and scribbling it all down frantically, as if a journalist working some undercover espionage.
When he'd been reunited with his lover, Jonghyun looked most unaffected by his encounter. He'd sat beside Minho hesitantly in one of those small, poky offices, that had been declared a plant-pot for warmth and a shuttered window for light, and Minho had been briefed on the situation. He'd been nervous, and he'd reached out and clutched Jonghyun’s hand, squeezing it tightly in his with a lowered head. To his surprise, Jonghyun didn’t tear his hand away, but he most certainly didn’t squeeze Minho’s back, and the couple were left in a gridlock where one understood how serious this was and the other, quite frankly, did not.
Minho had been told by the doctor that they weren't quite sure yet and that unfortunately, Jonghyun would have to come back for further analysis. Even when Minho had prompted an elaborated answer – for he was left more clueless in the aftermath of the examination than before – he was offered little other than a slap on the wrist by the bright-lipped nurse as she scolded him on being impatient.
Jonghyun had subsequently been examined further. The following weeks were arduous ones, and Minho had spent most of his time curled away in the dreary coffee shop, the greasy one, the one he'd met Jonghyun in. Whilst the other customers could conceal their rampant depression with a façade of joyous incoherence, Minho never had the ability. His eyes were downcast, his lips were hung low, and his gnawed nails only drummed the mug of coffee he ordered. The other patrons would watch him with sorrow brows, would whisper snide commentary over his movements, but would offer nothing in the way of direct communication, because people weren’t made to be direct, they were made to be hidden.
When Jonghyun had finally been pulled into the mental institution, Minho had been relieved. His partner was gaining help, and was no longer subjecting Minho to the incessant radio waves of talk between himself and the wall, the ramblings about the weather and the townsfolk and the latest plot-twist in his writing. But, nestled within his relief, Minho felt a pain he hadn’t ever known, a pain that not even the subterfuge of his apartment could console. In the dead of night, as rain shattered against the glass and the deadly whir of the city-traffic created a miasma of sound and light, Minho hugged himself tenderly, in a deep pining for Jonghyun. He longed for Jonghyun’s cute nose to bury into his strong shoulder, and for his little fingers to dig softly into Minho’s waist. He dreamed of his room being coated in Jonghyun’s sweet breaths and for the coldness of his body to be met by the tepid heat of Jonghyun’s.
Minho knew it would be months before he felt it again.
He'd visited Jonghyun as much as he could, but visitor hours were sparse and, on occasion, Minho became too frightened. The stigma surrounding mental institutions was an unforgiving one, and every year at least one tragic tale unfolded with an injured nurse and a violent patient. The idea that Jonghyun was trapped between various colours on the spectrum of mentality was an unsettling thought to Minho. The writer was a frail man at the best of times, slight and with a tendency to care too much for others. His posture was fragile though his will was strong, and all he wanted out of life was the assurance that those around him were dazed with a constant happiness. This made him vulnerable, and it made Minho protective of him, and to leave him alone in the strangest of places was against every instinct Minho honed.
At first, Jonghyun hadn’t fitted well into the institution. His room had been cramped and orange (what one of the matrons had described a positive colour) and full of notebooks and pens. It seemed even in his pastel blue hospital uniform and with his regular carers he was content in finishing what he'd started, his novel about a man's man who liked football and cars and beer and being obnoxious, and a feminine writer who liked spiders and small things and tall things like Minho. Jonghyun would frequently ask how his dog was as he chewed over the lid of his pen, and Minho had always answered that yeah, Roo was good. Their conversations had consisted of little. Minho had sat and watched Jonghyun write, and, when it would all become too much, he'd leave in a bandage of tears and a gauze of worry, for Jonghyun didn’t seem to be getting any better.
These things take time - the line he was fed as if he'd bought it from a ty vending machine.
When Jonghyun finally did start to settle in, Minho was beginning to grow accustomed to his new life also. He wondered why he couldn’t have a normal partner, one who knew the animate from the inanimate and talked to people rather than brick and mortar, but he'd figured to himself at the time that at least Jonghyun hadn’t been infected by insanity. He'd learned from a nurse with the penchant to talk more than she should dare that Jonghyun was a wonderful patient in the logs of the institution. In comparison to his fellow inmates, men and women with manic depressive tendencies and personalities so split they couldn’t count how many versions existed, Jonghyun was practically a pillar of health. Sure, he began to befriend the wall behind the headboard of his bed, but, in the nurse’s eyes, this was a mundane illness that would soon be cracked.
She was wrong.
When Minho hit the age of twenty-six, he'd celebrated his birthday alone, with Roo, who was getting elderly and was having difficulty forcing her crippled hind legs into action. He'd fed Roo a piece of chocolate from the box Jinki had given him (Jinki, his close friend who was settled down now, with a stable job and a stable family) and had eaten the rest of the box himself, for once not caring about calories, or about the sluggish feeling over-eating gave him. He hadn't been able to visit Jonghyun that day, but the elder had already been prepared and had given Minho his present in advance. Minho hadn't touched it yet, for he didn’t want to read a novel about a man's man who liked football and cars and beer and being obnoxious, and a feminine writer who liked spiders and small things and tall things like Minho. He wanted to embrace his boyfriend once again, inhale the familiar scent of coconut shampoo in his luscious hair, and whisper in his ear about how much he loved him, adored him, and wanted him by his side from now until forever. Wanted him in clarity, of course, not in insanity.
The next time Minho visited Jonghyun was another Thursday afternoon. The trees were bare, the leaves dead for winter, and it seemed the entire city hibernated but for the throngs of glittering Christmas lights that pulsed even in the early afternoon. By night, the streets would be littered in Christmas shoppers buying presents for those they harboured in their care, but not Minho. Minho would be somewhere else entirely.
There had been something quiet about the hospital that day. Approaching the winter months, a great sadness loomed over the institution, for Christmas was a sad time if you were lonely, and an even worse time if you were chronically depressed. The carollers paid no heed to the home for the mentally inadequate, and Santa Clause's sleigh flew by the slated rooftop, reindeers adamant that they couldn’t land on a home so lifeless. Inside the institution, the recreational rooms were decorated in the falsest of trees and the most limpid of tinsel, and fake presents sat beneath the plastic branches, simple cardboard boxes made elaborate by the vibrant wrapping paper.
Jonghyun had decorated his room, also. He'd drawn pictures, of trees and of snowflakes and of two men exchanging gifts, and he'd been pencilling another of these childish masterpieces when Minho had entered, clad in a black coat and an itchy scarf. It hadn’t struck Minho until that moment that, really, Jonghyun didn’t get any other visitors. His sister lived abroad and his parents had long since withered into death, and so the only one who cared for the writer who aged quicker than his years suggested was Minho. Jonghyun had been hunched upon a seat by the window, sketching with an intention almost endearing as he bit his bottom lip. He'd ignored Minho, mostly.
It was three days before Christmas when Jonghyun was finally returned to Minho. That night, everything within Minho became at peace. The nurses had said that Jonghyun was stable enough to go home, and Minho hadn’t argued. Instead, he'd driven Jonghyun to their shared apartment in silence, the elder nervously jittering as they journeyed, and had allowed him some much needed time with Roo, who wonderfully hadn’t forgotten him. Then, the night fell, and Minho finally felt Jonghyun’s cute nose bury into his strong shoulder, and his little fingers dig softly into his waist. He lay awake with his room being coated in Jonghyun’s sweet breaths and felt the coldness of his body met by the tepid heat of Jonghyun’s. Minho fell asleep in utter contentment, tears ridging his cheeks as he did so.
It was on Christmas day that Jonghyun asked Minho about the script he'd given him for his birthday. Minho had stopped then, for he had never read the script. He hadn’t forgotten, rather he'd side-lined, and kept it until he thought he could bring himself to read the dog-eared pages, only he'd never reached this stage in his progression, and had left it locked away in the drawers opposite the double-bed he shared with Jonghyun.
Minho figured Jonghyun had been dismissed too early.
Though nobody had ever defined insanity to Minho, part of him had decided he was piecing his own makeshift understanding together well. Insanity wasn’t the terseness of your statement when revising your list of victims, nor was it the detachment of your emotions from the life you once led. Insanity was indescribable, subjective, and something that was indifferent in some and a life-changer in others. Insanity was, and always would be, your manner of perception.
So, when Kim Jonghyun snapped and deviated from his nurse’s diagnosis, Minho began to comprehend insanity. Jonghyun had depended on Minho, and Minho had let him down, and Jonghyun knew – he knew – that if talking to the wall, he couldn’t be let down, for the wall didn’t have the capability of doing so. Minho was a man and men were a callous breed, who thought they understood when, really, they never would. And Jonghyun, well, Jonghyun was a writer, and always tried to understand though knew he never could. The difference was stark, the difference was vapid, and the difference was shown when Jonghyun started punching the wall in their apartment until his knuckles were bloody and Minho was hauling his scrabbling body away, whispering into his ear and calming his raging heart.
He was no longer talking to the wall, and Minho supposed that was a blessing, but now he couldn’t look at it, couldn't stomach it at all. This wall destroyed us was all he could yell at Minho, and Minho understood. Jonghyun wasn't insane, no, but his life was cloaked in an insanity he would never escape. Whether he spoke to his wall or was forced to ignore it, his entire life was affected by the mentality that would not falter. Minho couldn't force it out of him and nor could a romance built on a dingy apartment and a sheltered Christmas.
For if Minho were to define insanity to someone else, he'd tell them about Kim Jonghyun, and he'd tell them that, no matter how long you hide behind doctors and medication, if you're truly insane, you will never escape it.
Insanity is a mind-set the can never be fixed.
•••
A/N this is such a ty ramble oh my God, I don’t even know what it is. Like it feels there is too many pointless scenes x.x As for the story, I don’t necessarily //believe// the over arching message (that you cannot cure a mental illness), but it’s a theory of mine that, if you overcome some form of insanity, you'll still be plagued by another (i.e if you overcome depression, you'll be plagued by the memories), so that was basically the… basis for this pointless thing e.e as you can see, even though Jonghyun was dismissed and the nurses charted him as better, Minho understands that he never truly will be. Which is… sad or… something. I am, as ever, unsure e.e
Anyway, I must apologise to my friend because this genuinely was intended to be fluff and she asked for fluff and BANANA I'M SORRY PLEASE ACCEPT THIS WEIRD ONESHOT INSTEAD AND I //SWEAR// NEXT CHAPTER WILL BE SPECIAL JONGTAEKEY ALTHOUGH LEGIT EVERY ONE OF THESE HAS INCLUDED JONGHYUN BUT YOU WANT JONGTAEKEY SO like personally I think minkeynew sounds great but WHATEVER. I PROMISE. I'M SORRY FOR POSTING THIS BC DISAPPOINTING AF. BUT. I AM TRYING.
Anyway, thank you for reading all and :3 I hope you, like, don’t mind how rough this is around the edges, because it is very rough around the edges TvT
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