Title: You Ignite
Pairing: Jongin/Kris, Jongin/Kai
Genre: multi-universe!AU, idk what this is
Rating: G
Summary: Kai discovers his alter ego, Jongin. And Jongin, Jongin finds a little more.

based on a plot mentioned by jongene on tumblr:
"Kai uses his powers to teleport to another universe and ends up meeting his alter ego, Jongin."
(though i'm not sure if this is even worth reading idk i fail at everything )

            There’s something he does a lot, Kai. It’s been a while since he’s made it his profession, made it something he does not only for a living but as a style of life itself. He jumps from the roof of his twelve story apartment building two times a week and lets gravity hug him waist down as he surrenders to the fast clicks of his high-speed camera, rapid snaps whispering to the plummeting wind as it shrieks in his ear. The thrill pumps adrenaline through the tracks of his veins and arteries as he watches the world violently clash in juts of mixed color around him.

            It’s been a while since he’s actually, truly landed, a while since he’s stepped on ground outside of his house honestly speaking. Kai is a migrating Arctic tern in his own snail shell of a home; travels far greater distances known to mankind yet never leaves the building. The secret, as he’d learned age ten during one almost-fatal fall off the same roof he frequents now, lies in his fingertips. As the light gray cement closes in on the frames of his lens and the magnetic pressure on Kai’s back increases to breaking point, he snaps his fingers.

            And then, the floor is gone.

          Toes tap lightly, anxiously, on pale waxed tiles as Jongin manages to breathe out, “Kris, I’ve got a song for you.” He lets it sink in, then stops to blinks twice as he slumps his shoulders. The Beats headphones swung over his neck sags with the droop.  “Like that?” he asks uncertainly, eyebrows meeting at the center.

            “Yes, like that. Now call him up,” Jongdae, his closest friend in the company, says. They’ve been friends for a long time; almost as long as Jongin had been a part of SM Entertainment’s production crew. He always says Jongin can become famous if he’d wanted, that he has the face and the body and the pure talent and skill, but he lacks just one thing. God is fair, he says as he wraps an arm around his friend’s head and gives it a wild ruffle, nobody gets to be perfect. And your one flaw, my friend, is your lack of confidence. This same, supportive friend nudges his head in the direction of Jongin’s phone lying expectantly next to the slowly-warming mouse pad. A lost puppy looks back up at the singer, a sort of worried shimmer lying underneath his orbs.

            “Just like that? I mean, I have no reason to call him, honestly. It’s awkward to just ring him up all of a sudden and be like ‘Hey man I have a song I wrote for you’, don’t you think?” Jongin sighs, this side to him a complete opposite of when he is composing songs in his office or when his juniors come to ask for critique on their own pieces. Kris, one of the older solo artists of the company, never fails to intimidate him despite how friendly and calming he is. It’s his heart that’s the matter, Jongin thinks with a groan, thoroughly drained by the fact that he is reduced to a simpleton whenever Kris walks into the room. His stupid heart holds him back every single time.

            “Just do it, Jongin,” the vocal of M2 says, rolling his eyes. “Grow a pair of balls, will you?”

            But it’s not exactly the issue of having balls or not when it comes down to it. Jongin has so many songs he secretly dedicates to Kris, so many CDs and files stored in the folder-inception of his computer that are marked with the letter I and a Harry Potter lightning symbol. It’s the issue of admitting to his affections for the older male, coming to terms with the crush he, the experienced, most well-off, respected composer and producer of the company Kris is signed under, has on someone who calls him “Master Jong” for short when he tries to wheedle a song out of him. It’s the heart shrivels and the shrunken ego and the hold-my-phone-until-you-text-me symptoms that he has a problem with, because there is no way Kim Jongin is in love.

            “I’m not calling him,” Jongin decides as he shakes his head, “Nope.”

            Jongdae gives an exasperated throw of arms as he spins a 180 on his black leather chair. “Are you seriously just going to wait until the bastard calls you? What are you, a girl?”

            “No, I’m just,” Jongin defends, huffing. “I’m busy right now, that’s why. I’m – I’m preparing for M1’s comeback and you really shouldn’t even be in here because you at all the choreo. Don’t make my music look bad, Jongdae. I may create sick beats but if you go horse-galloping all over them, people won’t get the full effect.”

            “Ouch,” the main vocal says with a frown, scalded. “Ouch, you douche. Alright then, stay here and die as a . I hope Kris never calls you.”

            “Kim Jongdae!” The songwriter aggressively shoos said vocal away as the older shrieks with laughter. “God.”

            “Not God, just Jongdae!” he hears him shout down the hallway. When Jongdae leaves, Jongin sighs into his hands as he peeks through a tangle of fingers at his phone lit up with a notification. Heartbeat quickening, he reaches shy fingers across the desk to the vibrating object.

            It’s Kris. ing Jongdae, it’s Kris.

            By the next two point five seconds, Jongin has picked his phone up and squeaked out,” Hello?” and also made Kris chuckle. By the next minute, Kris has asked him if he could come over sometime to get some advice on his own composed songs, and by the next five, Jongin has bitten his lips so hard that he’s worried they will bleed. And then the next ten minutes, he spends talking to Kris because for some reason, the older won’t hang up.

            Kai finds that he concentrates best when there is absolute silence, a dark sort of light penetrating one corner of the room as he stares at the developed photos, dry and lined across his stark white wall. Being alone is something he enjoys, filled with the thought that he reigns in this sort of bleak nothing with no one above, no one below. He likes existing in this anticlimactic state, loves submerging himself into a narrowed tunnel circumscribing a room full of black and whites that swirl in dizzying forms to make out ballpark figures. These are what keep him feeling alive; the photographs, the falls, the photographs of the falls. It’s like he’s forgotten time and gravity and space and earth; like he’s in another dimension.

            When his father had given him the camera, he’d done so secretly. Each family carried different abilities, and all the male Kim’s were able to travel long distances in short periods of time. He’d mentioned that the camera was something only they could have, something no one else in their world knew about. And he’d told him that it captures moments into things called pictures, like saving a piece of his day in a rectangular product extracted from the films. Things like this, his father had said, are usually handled by the Huang’s. They are the only ones who are able to store the past in snapshots, and in their heads at that. And he is told not to tell anyone.

            In his earlier years, he’d never questioned how and where his father had collected such a strange piece. But now, he does. He thinks about forbidden thoughts sometimes, has dreams where he is teleporting to a place he knows only exists in his imagination. He questions his friend Luhan about these dreams because the Lu’s have the ability to warp minds in their unconscious state, but Luhan denies it, tells him that he’s never used his abilities outside of his house like they are supposed to. And consequently, Kai begins to wonder.

            Three days, he spends staring at his recent black and whites and develops a theory that there may be such a thing as a world outside of the one he knows now, one that his late father had visited to retrieve his camera. Just three days, and he decides he will try it. He is going to attempt the longest jump he has ever even thought of accomplishing; he has nothing to lose anyway. It takes a full six months before he is able to teleport across the planet to his uncle’s place one frosted, snowy night, and another six to master meditation for this unknown journey. And then, one miraculous day, it happens.

            Jongin swears there is someone who looks exactly like him. Often, he sees him outside of the company building; when he has finished up all his work and fumbles with his keys as he walks to his car, he sees him. Just in the corner of his eyes for a half-fraction of a second, and he always misses him by a hair.

            “Kris,” he calls worriedly over the phone every time. “It’s Jongin. Uhm, I’m a little scared right now so I’m calling you – as usual, sorry.”

            The first time Kai sees Jongin, he stays frozen in spot for a full minute. They have the same double eyelids, the same acne scars from younger years, the full lips, soft brown hair, the same perfectly slanted nose, same jaw line, same most of everything. The only difference lies in the way they carry their feet, with Jongin trailing colors of white and light brown while Kai paints everything black and gray. It takes him a while to pick up on the foreign name, one night when Kai has followed his supposed clone to his work and then back, while he is calling someone through a device called a phone. It seems like he is talking to himself, but later, Kai finds that he is speaking to someone through the object in his hand. He wonders if this is some sort of teleportation of the voice, like him and his body except for this Jongin guy, it is with words. Three times, he tries to confront him. He knows he shouldn’t because he has no idea where he is and why the trees on this side of the universe are so short, but every time he tries to put this confusion past him and approach this man who looks exactly like him, he finds that he can’t. It’s a little daunting, the thought that someone with the same face has a different name, so on the third try, he dyes his hair black. And he waits. He learns, drinks in all the information about this world that he can, and then on the night he decides to take a picture of Jongin, he gets caught.

            “You!”

            Three seconds of shock, and then Kai disappears into thin air, leaving Jongin baffled and afraid.

            Every time Kai travels back to his home, he is sweating and huffing and gasping. It takes a great toll on him, especially when he does it often like he does now, darting from universe to universe out of sheer curiosity. It’s dizzying, the fact of this man who looks exactly like him, speaks in the same voice, but seems so immensely different from him that he questions what exactly is going on. The strangest thing is that he understands his tongue, that they speak the same language despite how far Kai has traveled. Even back home, he is surrounded by Luhan who speaks Chinese and also Amber who is fluent in English. But he is sure that this Earth is different from the one he visits, because there are no people with powers or strange tiny boxes that allow communication across the city. So he decides he will bring Jongin here, to see if he knows.

            The plan is simple, without flaw. He teleports, he grabs Jongin, and then they are back home together – Kai’s home.

            Jongin awakes to a familiar speckled ceiling. His body feels like it is levitating a couple inches off the bed, but when he shuffles his hands around the sheets, he finds that he is on level with gravity. The room he is in is vaguely his, the objects inside it the same and the shape similar as well. He must have had a bad dream, he thinks, disheveled and disordered as he slips his feet out of the blankets and focuses his spinning eyes on the wooden floor. He’s sure there was a jacket he left strewn across his desk chair, but it’s not there anymore when he looks, a frown forming across his forehead the longer the seconds of his awakened state ticks by. Slightly suspicious, he steps outside the door.

            “You’re awake,” a voice, his voice, says, startling him. And then he realizes who’d said it, and Jongin loses all strength in his legs.

            It’s him. It’s Kim Jongin, but in a slightly older looking form maybe one or two years older, with a shadow under his forehead from his dark fringe, subtly piercing eyes. It’s him, but it’s not him, and Jongin shudders as his eyes rake over the figure standing before him.

            “My name is Kai,” he says, lips moving in the same way he knows his does when he’s talking. Jongin is stunned by how dark of an aura this Kai person gives off, like his insides are covered in a thin layer of charcoal, black seeping into red slowly but surely. He has no emotion on his face, just intimidating eyes and a stone cold glare. “And you, you’re Jongin.”

            The last thing he registers before everything flashes to black is the gleam of Kai’s leather jacket, something he himself would never wear in public. Jongin is a sweats kind of guy, loves the comfortable flexibility they allow. His arms and legs feel like they are drifting away from his body in a deep, dark, underwater abyss, and when he wakes up, he is home again.

            Kris worries just a little sometimes, when Jongin comes to work with dark bags under his eyes and doesn’t notice he is in the room until he is right behind him, hand resting atop the beanie on the composer’s head.

            “What are you working on?” he asks occasionally, but Jongin’s screen always looks the same, no melodies lilting out of the electric keyboard and headphones dangling lifelessly over the armrest of his chair. One night, when most of the staff have left and Kris stays behind to record a few lines, Jongin snuggles into him.

            “What’s wrong?” he asks, but all Jongin does is close his eyes and stay there silently, a little painfully, curled into his arms.

            “I’m having nightmares,” he confesses, and Kris takes him home, sings lullabies by his ear through the phone until the younger falls asleep. It is the first time they've hugged, the first time Jongin had let himself go from the shy, stiff image he poses whenever they are together. He must be really troubled, Kris thinks, because Jongin has always been bad at relationships, never is one to cave into welcoming arms. Even with friends, he has trouble expressing his concerns or giving into his wants or dealing with his needs. Work consumes half his life, his fear the other, and sometimes Kris finds that he barely has room to squeeze in. But he wants to be that haven for Jongin, wants to be the pile of blankets Jongin returns to at night in bed. And he wants to hold him, not because of his position in the company or perpetually surprising skills, but because Jongin is always so pure and transparent despite his silent, nonexistent words.

            Kris thinks he might be a little in love.

            At first, the visits scare Jongin. He is afraid of many, many things in this world, the smallest ranging from cockroaches to thunder to confessing his feelings and maybe liking Kris – but this newfound fear is unlike any other. It’s like he has gone a little crazy, like sometimes he is plunged into an intoxicated state where he must be seeing hallucinations of someone who looks just like him yet acts in such a different way. He is not friendly but he is not hostile either, and Kai asks him many questions, like what he does for a living and if anyone on his side of the universe has powers. They make his head spin, and even if Kai looks a little rough, he always hands him water or something that looks vaguely like orange juice when it seems like he might pass out.

            He’s learning to focus though, the air in his lungs a lot cleaner than it used to be, vision no longer blurring at every movement. It seems less and less like a dream the longer he stays here, the more often Kai whisks him to this version of reality. Time is universal, but it seems as though they are running on different clocks.

            “So this Kris guy you are always talking to – what is he to you?” Kai asks, shuffling through his mess of photos sprawled across the black, marbled tea table. Jongin does not understand what those photographs represent, if they are useful ones at all. They all look like shots taken in a drunken state.

            “He’s…,” Jongin starts, finding a light shade of comfort when he talks about something from home, someone he carries with him wherever he goes. “He’s…”

            “Love, isn’t it?” Kai asks, picking up a particular black-and-white photo and disappearing momentarily from his spot in the living room to the other side, zapping to identity again in order to hang it with a clothespin on a string he has adorned half the living room with, a part of his house he never lingers long in despite its name. “It’s that thing you guys call love.”

            Looking down at his toes, Jongin bites his tongue and doesn’t respond.

            “I don’t know why you’re so scared of everything,” Kai continues, taking down the old photographs hanging beside the one he’s placed just now. Carefully stacking them, he vanishes into his room, reappears with a box in hand to hold the replaced pictures. “You don’t even look me in the eye when I talk to you.” A smirk plays by his lips, a sort of confidence to it as if he knows Jongin is a coward; as if in another world, Kim Jongin might have been a Kai and that he will be able to hold on to people when they flitter by his side.

            “Look at me,” Kai says, arriving with a sudden burst of invisible air in front of him, dark hair falling chicly over his eyes. In all honesty, he has gathered enough information about this world Jongin comes from, exactly where his treasured camera roots its origin, that Jongin is Kai but Kai is not really Jongin, that they live in the same house in different times and maybe different dimensions, but he does not want to let him go. It is interesting whenever Jongin cracks a small smile, something that never quite makes its way across his own face, and Kai is fascinated by the little laughs emitted from this visage of his that carries a different soul altogether, a separate shade of identity with the same fingerprint; his alter ego, his other self.

            Heart racing in his chest, Jongin does not turn his gaze upward, just shrinks into himself as he wills his self-consciousness to please subside. Without warning, Kai cups his chin and raises his head, looking deep into his eyes with those two raven orbs, still piercing after all this time but with a dull knife instead of sharp talons. They melt a little into Jongin, give him a glance of something he’s been missing all his life, the little bit of ferocity he had never found in himself.

            “I want you to look at me like this all the time. When you talk to me, look into my eyes,” Kai says, and Jongin finds a small butterfly spreading its wings in the back of his chest, a sort of realization of how mesmerizing he is when he looks like this, when Kai shows this fire with their same face. The frightening truth of this strange twist in universe has long since lost its fearful shiver. Jongin now sees a little of Kai he wants in himself, wants to be like Kai if only by a minuscule amount. He wants to be this bold and confident and uncaring and solid.

            These days, when he goes home, he stares into the mirror and expects to see Kai on the other side. He calls Kris on his own, talks a little over half an hour each time and comes close to confessing on so many occasions that his heart knows the drill; pumping extra blood through his whole system whenever Kris comes into his office at spontaneous hours of the day saying he wants to go grab lunch with him or that he’s finished early so they can spend some time together, when he admits back that he’s tried to finish just as fast so that they can clear both schedules.

            Kai swoops by now and then, leaves a little note by his bedside cabinet at three in the morning as he comes to watch Jongin sleep, soft eyelashes fluttering gently over his caramel skin, color returning to his once paled face. They are words that do not mean anything, just traces that Kai exists.

            Moon.

            Gray.

            Time.

            Camera.

            I’m going jumping tomorrow. I’ll pick you up.

            Jongin plummets.

            It is afternoon, the sun beating angry rays down both their backs as they stand side by side on the edge of Kai’s roof. Jongin has no clue what they are doing until Kai grabs his hand and jumps over the ledge without notice, leaping on an offbeat that Jongin stumbles over as he feels his body tilt.

            The first feeling is panic. It rides up all the veins in his body and makes his blood freeze so fast that he feels a bar smack in the middle of his spine. His hair stands on end both instinctively and because of gravity, wind seeping through him, slotting holes through him, as he falls. And he wants to scream, but the air chokes him and clogs his lungs and he watches through teary eyes as Kai lets go of his hand, readjusting his fingers on the shutters of his camera as he clicks rapidly, and it’s only then that Jongin understands.

            These strange pictures Kai always seems to be engrossed in are snapshots of the world in its most unstable state, the moment in which it exists yet does not exist, a wormhole that Kai slithers into every time he falls. Suddenly, all movements slow down and Jongin feels an arm wrap around his shoulders as his settings warp around him, a navy colored sort of wave washing into his eyes and ears yet not physically but figuratively. That’s what it feels like. It’s something he has never felt before in his life.

            “What was that?” he asks Kai when they catch their breaths in his small apartment bedroom again. A dark look flits across Kai’s eyes before he looks away and shakes his head to say that nothing is wrong; that nothing is out of the ordinary.

            He kisses him. On the night of Kris’ solo concert, two minutes before show time, Jongin visits the tall singer and wishes him luck, hugs him as best as he can with fingers trembling both from the excitement of showing the world Kris’ and his music collaboration and from the thought that he is stepping, little by little, outside his comfort zone to walk slowly towards Kris. For some reason, the solo artist looks just a little anxious, eyes darting back and forth on Jongin’s face.

            “I’m not gonna lie, I’m actually kind of nervous today,” he confesses, taking a deep breath and stretching his fingers inside his white leather glove. His other hand is intertwined with Jongin’s, though neither of them are aware of it.

            “You’re nervous? Kris Wu, nervous?” Jongin asks, eyes curving just a little in amusement. The helpless giant looks back at him and smiles a little, nodding. “You’ll do great,” he assures then, giving the singer’s hand a squeeze. “I know you will. I trust you.”

            “Thanks, Jongin,” Kris says, a happy glint to his eyes. “I’m gonna do my best.”

            And it’s something about that moment, the chaos outside in the audience and the chaos churning inside both Jongin and Kris, the fading memory of a man named Kai and something about Luhan, whoever that is. He’s forgetting something great but he doesn’t know what, just feels like he’s soaring whenever he looks into Kris’ eyes, like he is plummeting but with the guarantee that he will land safely. It’s the months Jongin has dragged out of this fluttering feeling caused by his favorite solo artist, the words hesitantly spilt over his lips late at night over the phone and in moments caught off guard. It’s Kris, really, standing before him at the greatest shining point of his life, yet to Jongin it is the dimmest. Kris has always been a friend, not a star. And so he places a hand on his friend’s shoulder and pulls him down just a bit so that his lips can brush over his own before fitting perfectly together, heart racing and palms sweating. It’s a separate dimension altogether when Kris kisses him back, fingers slowly threading around his neck to pull him closer, to say thank you. Thank you for the kiss, thank you for the moment, thank you for you. And Kris really loves Jongin, every little bit, because he is so unpredictable, shy and bursting with emotion, all for him.

            “I’d date you,” Jongin says, watching as Kai leans his coffee mug against the wall and balancing it. “If I were someone else, I’d date you. I’d date me.”

            Kai smirks a little as he brings the lens of his camera to his eyes, focusing the shot before capturing the tilted cup in a small frame he will later blow up.

            “I’d date you too,” he says, looking Jongin straight in the eyes as he speaks, like he tells him to do. “You’re unstable. I like that.”

            They plummet a couple more times after, the navy waves thicker and more suffocating with the consecutive falls. Jongin even thinks he might see specks of dandelion yellow, some hazy shades of gray. Kai explains that it’s how they will say goodbye one day, that Kai and Jongin both will have to erase this meeting place they intersect in. It is because every time they meet, they seem to be merging at the center, Kai becoming a little more like Jongin, and Jongin, a little more like Kai. So one day, Jongin finds himself at home, staring blankly above at his ceiling, and he wonders.

            How many times does one have to spin the globe to find home, to pinpoint the speck they exist on? And he realizes that it’s always a struggle, finding out the who’s and where’s and most importantly, the why’s. When Kris holds him, he is Jongin. When he makes music, he is Jongin. And when he is emerging from his shell, he is still Jongin. There is a whole world inside of him already, and Jongin returns to it daily, doesn’t need to know exactly where in himself his true identity dwells.

            It feels like he’s been taught a lesson when he thinks of it like this, but he cannot recall a teacher. But sometimes, he remembers the flaps of paper he used to collect and bring back to a home much like his own, a vague sense of familiarity.

            Kai.

            And sometimes when he dreams, he dreams in navy.