IF YOU LOVE ME OR NOT

The next day at the market was not an enjoyable one. Jaejoong knew refusing to speak to Yunho was out of the question if they wanted to work together, but he still couldn't bring himself to be forgiving over what Minhee had told him the other day. In any case, having Jaejoong grunting at him noncommittally the whole morning made Yunho so thoroughly ticked off that a reconciliation wouldn't have had any effect. He was a nice guy, but not to the point where he was fine with being snapped at indefinitely for no apparent reason, especially if Jaejoong had no intentions whatsoever of explaining himself.

He was the one who lied, Jaejoong repeated to himself whenever Yunho's glare passed over him. He's been using me from almost as long as I've known him, so it's fine to be mad.

Right before afternoon, he saw Minhee lingering not too far off from the stall with a small group of girls at her side. Their eyes met, and she gave him a faint, almost questioning smile. He returned it with a slight nod before looking away. She was probably there to admire Yunho, or whatever girls did with guys they weren't quite dating anymore, and he didn't want to have anything to do with it.

Why didn't they just get together again if they were still in love with each other? Yoochun had been so sure they were over, but wasn't there something there after all if they both were planning on dating again? He wasn't in love with her, or else he would have given his entire world to her... she didn't know him well enough to be in love with him...

Jaejoong shook his head. Yoochun had to be mistaken. Yunho hadn't talked it over properly with him, and he'd misunderstood. Yunho and Minhee hadn't fully broken up like he'd thought; they'd simply delayed their relationship for a better time.

When lunch time rolled around, the ahjummas came over with bowls full of dukbokki, but Jaejoong stepped out before they could serve some to him, muttering something to Yunho about wanting to talk to Yoochun for a bit. Yunho's glare had turned colder, but he hadn't stopped him or offered to follow.

Junsu and Yoochun were both hard at work when he arrived, wrapping up with the pre-lunch crowd. They waved to Jaejoong when he approached, but they looked more concerned than happy to see him. Jaejoong wondered if Yunho had already texted them to see if they knew what the hell had set him off yesterday, keeping them informed of their fight.

“Jaejoong hyung...” Junsu said uncertainly, wiping his hands off on his apron. “Is everything okay?”

“Did Yunho tell you?”

“No. Changmin-ah stopped by earlier and said he couldn't even get close to your booth this morning through all the tension in the air. Are you and Yunho fighting about something?”

“Not fighting,” Jaejoong said darkly. “Just... a small personal issue.”

“Hyung. You can tell me... did I do a bad thing by talking about you to Minhee noona the other day?” Junsu looked at his feet guiltily. “I told her not to bother you so soon, but when she gets something into her head...”

“It was nothing,” Jaejoong muttered. Being upset with Yunho was enough; he didn't need to extend it to Junsu, too.

“She certainly was very enthusiastic about you, though,” Junsu said, scratching his head. “It may have been overwhelming, especially since she used to date Yunho hyung, but you shouldn't let that bother you. Minhee noona is pretty harmless, so if you just tell her upfront...”

“And there's no need to take it out on Yunho hyung,” Yoochun added, looking at Jaejoong curiously. “What she feels is her business.”

“It may be more his business more than you think,” Jaejoong said, shaking his head. “I don't want to talk about it, all right?”

“Fine. But whatever idea you've got about that in your head, that doesn't change the fact that the thing with Minhee was her not him. So if you aren't interested, politely tell her, and stop getting mad at Yunho over something that isn't his fault.”

Jaejoong wanted to tell Yoochun just how much it was Yunho's fault, but he stopped short for a moment. What were Junsu and Yoochun expecting him to tell Minhee? She hadn't asked him anything, had she? He thought back to their conversation, trying to remember. He had missed a chunk of it while he'd processed her bombshell about Yunho getting serious about music for the sake of impressing her, and now that he thought of it, she had asked him what he'd thought about something she'd said right before he'd stormed out on her. But what more could she have wanted from him? Was it possible that she had requested to enlist his help in keeping her posted about Yunho, or something along those lines?

He wanted to ask Yoochun or Junsu for clarification, but new customers had appeared to take their attention, and he needed to be getting back to his own booth in any case. Regardless of how difficult being around Yunho was, he owed it to Auntie Minjung's generosity to continue doing a good job with his work.

The look on Yunho's face when he got back to the shop was different than it had been when he'd left. He didn't look angry or annoyed anymore, only troubled, particularly when Jaejoong chanced glancing into his eyes. Seriously, are Junsu and Yoochun texting him and telling him everything?, Jaejoong thought, slightly panicked. Yunho opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something, but before any words came out, he was distracted by something out of the corner of his eye. Jajeoong followed his gaze. Minhee and her friends had wandered back and were looking at them with interest, Jaejoong in particular. Yunho shut his mouth and ground his fists into the lid of their cashbox, but he didn't say anything more.

We don't know how to talk to each other anymore, Jaejoong thought sadly. Both of us aren't telling the truth, and if we can't even be honest with each other, how are we supposed to be friends? I was kidding myself from the start. It's not possible for us to go any further than this.

Yunho looked at him one more time, a bitter smile thrown on his face, and for the rest of the day, they didn't say another word to each other.

0o0

They were well on their way to another day spent in surly silence when Auntie Minjung stepped in the next morning. While the two of them were wordlessly loading up their crates, she stopped by and placed her hand on Jaejoong's shoulder, gesturing for him to set his work down.

“Yunho, you'll be fine by yourself at the market today, won't you?” she asked, though her firm voice didn't exactly leave him any room to say 'no'. “I'd like Jaejoong goon to help me in the garden today.”

“Whatever you want, Auntie,” Yunho said tiredly. Jaejoong could tell he hadn't slept well, since he'd also stayed up most the night tossing and turning. Between thinking about Minhee and Yunho, his brain hadn't been able to shut off, and Yunho had apparently experienced a similar difficultly, though Jaejoong couldn't say what exactly he'd been thinking about since they still weren't speaking to each other.

“I'll show you around, then,” she said, steering Jaejoong away from Yunho. “If you don't learn the plants properly, you'll hurt them, and if you hurt them, I'll hurt you, so wake yourself up and pay attention.”

Jaejoong smiled and rubbed his eyes. After a whole day of near silence, her brusqueness was a welcome relief. Perhaps a little bit of time away from each other would do him and Yunho some good; they couldn't fight the entire summer, after all, without making things incredibly awkward for each other.

Once he was more alert, Auntie Minjung took him through every section of her garden one-by-one, explaining which plants she grew, and how they needed to be taken care of. The lack of rain during the heatwave had been causing issues, she explained, but since there was a big storm anticipated for that evening, they would need to be careful about how they were watered that morning.

“A little rain is a good thing, but a lot can be just as bad as having no water at all,” she lectured. “Some of the smaller plants will need to be covered in cloches to moderate the amount the water they'll receive, and I have wire cages for the tomato plants to keep them standing when the storm hits. I'll need your help setting them up, but you'll have to be very careful not to damage the plant in the process. These plants are food, and food is life, and I'll make your life difficult if you forget that.”

Jaejoong nodded. She set up the first cage on her own so he could get a feel for how it was done, and once he'd studied the process thoroughly, he tried it for himself.

“You know, I think of my plants as my children sometimes,” Auntie Minjung said as they worked, her hard voice suddenly tender. “It's no wonder flower and tree growers call their gardens nurseries. Just as a mother puts her heart into raising a child well, I put my heart here and use everything I have to make these seedlings grow. I wasn't expecting to ever have children of my own, and having Yunho living with me was not something I anticipated, so this garden was the only family I had for the longest time.”

“You never wanted to get married?” Jaejoong asked.

“Wanted to?” She laughed. “I'm sure things are different in the country proper, but when you live too close to civilization, planting and farming are hardly fashionable hobbies for a woman to enjoy. The boys I grew up wanted to date pretty and refined beauties, and who could blame them? Enjoy the fruits of life while you're still young and beautiful!” She chuckled again. “Of course, it takes awhile for men to realize that there's no happiness in marrying someone whose only charm is that they're beautiful. But by time practicality dawned, my heart was already stolen by this land right here. I don't care much one way or another about having a husband, but I did regret not having a child. Perhaps that's why I was so eager to snatch Yunho up when his parents were having difficulties with him.”

“He seems happy here.”

“Oh, I don't doubt that. My sister has asked him to come back any number of times, but he hasn't left me yet. I feel rather selfish when it comes to that. My sister and her husband are good people, but Yunho was their first child, and they didn't always know what to do with him. I took advantage of that weakness to have him as my own child, but I feel sometimes as if I robbed him of his own family in the process. He's got a little sister and parents back home, but he still won't leave because he thinks there's more freedom for him here.”

Auntie Minjung knelt down, gently touching one of the red tomatoes growing in her garden. “That's the funny thing about children that are your own. They come from you, and are liable to share your weaknesses and make your same mistakes. Because you've lived and suffered already, you want to spare them your pain. You forget that they're only your children and not you yourself, and that they need to live for themselves and their own desires rather than follow in the footsteps of yours. They need to suffer their own pain and learn from it. Perhaps because I'm not a real mother, I realized this when my sister didn't.”

She stopped talking for a moment to go grab a few cloches to cover the smaller plants in the other areas of the garden. Jaejoong waited for her to continue, wondering why she was sharing this with him. She wasn't the kind of woman who said things without a point to them, so he was sure she was leading up to something she wanted him to hear.

“Our Yunho is a good boy, isn't he?” she said turning back to Jaejoong. “But I'll grant that he doesn't care very much about sitting in school or anything we adults consider to be valuable professions. From the moment he saw a street group performing a song and dance act on the streets when he was little, that's all he's ever had on his mind. My sister dropped out of school to waitress when she was a teenager, and her husband is a businessman who's proudly provided for his family with his work. She wants her son to have a proper education, and his father wants him to have the same security he grew up with. Those are both valid concerns, but they never factored what Yunho wanted into them. He resisted them because they did not see him properly, and isn't what a child wants the most is to be affirmed by his parents?”

Auntie Minjung wiped her brow and looked up at the threatening clouds in the sky. “Yunho is not my true son. I didn't give birth to him, and when he looks at me, I don't see myself in his eyes. I see a kind and talented boy, one who can sing sweetly and play your heart on the strings of his guitar. I'm proud of the boy that I see. So proud that it doesn't make a difference to me whether he's my true son or not because I love him beyond any definition. And I love him enough to realize what makes him happy and what makes him unhappy. And let me say this to you, Kim Jaejoong: I've never heard anything happier than the voice that floats downstairs when he's singing with you, and nothing more unhappy than the sound of his silence now that he can't anymore. Music has always mattered more than anything to that boy, but your music was special. To him, and to you, too. Your voice was always singing those heartbreaking words right along with him, but little by little you also lost your unhappiness. But now...” She looked back at him. “All I have are two very unhappy boys in my house. Two boys who I care about that are hurting each other and tearing themselves away from the music they both love.”

“I...” Jaejoong's hand stilled against the wire he was setting up, his heart throbbing. She wasn't wrong. Whether it had been because of Minhee or not, the happiness they'd felt in those moments hadn't been a lie. Yunho had smiled reading his words, and Jaejoong had smiled to watch him. Their bitterness had erased that, and now they were both as miserable as she'd said.

“When I look at you, you strike me as so similar to my Yunho,” Auntie Minjung said softly. “But more fragile in so many ways. You're more liable to get hurt than he is, and as someone who has suffered, you must be careful that you don't externalize that pain and hurt others with it. You care about him. I can read that in his face just as clearly as I can read that he genuinely cares about you. Your heart is hurt, but you were helping each other to heal, even if you didn't realize it. Are you sure what you want to do is rip off the bandaging and hurt all over again?”

Jaejoong bit his lips, fighting back the urge to cry in front of her. “I'm also... I also grew up where I wasn't supposed to care about music this much,” he said shakily. “I loved it, but I also hated it sometimes because it set me apart me from everyone and made me different. I never thought anyone would ever care about the songs I wrote, so when Yunho did... it felt like I was giving my heart away. But it's only music. It's only songs.”

“Oh, I doubt very much that you actually believe that,” Auntie Minjung said. “And I doubt Yunho believes that either, or else you won't be so close after knowing each other so little to the point where you wind up moping over some misunderstanding or another. So if you'd like to stop hurting each other when you'd clearly rather not, I would stop hesitating so much in 'giving your heart away,' as you put it. If he's misunderstanding you, make him understand your heart through your songs. And if you're misunderstanding him, let him teach you his heart through his guitar. If it's really 'only music,' it won't change anything, but if it isn't, won't you have the answer you're looking for?”

That's right, he realized. Even more so than a mutual love, I wanted that connection between us that I could believe in. Because if he genuinely loves my music, he loves at least one piece of my heart, even if he can't accept the whole thing.

Auntie Minjung reached over and ruffled his hair. “You're not my son either, and I can't tell either you or Yunho what to do. But when you love someone, you do what you can to keep them safe and happy.” She placed the last cloche on top of a seedling. “And I'd like very much to have this house be a happy one again.”

Jaejoong nodded, at last swallowing back his anger and bitterness. “Okay, Auntie Minjung. I'll try.”

0o0

By time the work day ended, it was already raining, so Yunho didn't make his usual disappearance but instead came home an hour early. Jaejoong was waiting for him at the door when Yunho came in, his hair dripping and his clothing damp.

“Come with me,” Jaejoong said, taking a deep breath and grabbing his wrist. Auntie Minjung's words had given him some courage, but he was still shaking when they touched. He couldn't bring himself to completely excuse Yunho for involving his songs in winning Minhee over, but he wanted to believe again that they'd meant more to him than that, and that he had meant more as well.

Jaejoong pulled Yunho into his room and grabbed his notebook from the nightstand, flipping it open to Still in Love. Yunho looked at him expectantly, not angry or upset or even troubled anymore. Simply waiting.

Jaejoong looked squarely into his eyes and sang the words that he had only coldly recited the night before. It's painful that everyone knows, it's so true, I'm nothing but a fool for you, but I don't care, I'll always be here loving you with all I got. I don't care if you love me or not.

He took another deep breath as soon as the final high note had died in his throat. “I won't change my mind about those words,” he said, holding Yunho's eyes. “I'm not saying that it's okay to think that way, but I'm saying that it's how someone might feel if they lost faith in themselves. How they do feel. I know I'm not wrong, so I'm not going to change it.”

Yunho smiled faintly at him. “Personal experience?”

“Maybe. But even if someone says 'I don't care if you love me or not,' I'm sure they do care. They care a lot. But either way, they're not going to change how they feel right away even if they can't be loved back.” He sat down on the bed beside Yunho. “Even if you don't agree, do you like the song?”

“Of course. And I understand what you mean, too. I'm not sure that's how I'd feel about it, if it were me, but I'm definitely not everyone, am I?” He placed his hand over Jaejoong's. “So we're talking now?”

“If you tell me this honestly: what is it about my music that you like?”

“How real it feels to me,” he answered immediately. “I've watched plenty of idols and singers, but you were the first who looked so moved by the words you were singing. I could tell that those songs were you. So even though I liked the words, I liked watching you perform them most.” He grinned. “Honestly, playing them on my guitar and singing along with you is the secondary thing. Just hearing you sing them yourself would be enough.”

Jaejoong closed his eyes and smiled. Even though he wouldn't fool himself into thinking Yunho would return his feelings anymore, this assurance was enough. The music at least had meant more to him than what his feelings for Minhee brought to it. It wasn't everything, but it was enough to help him to forgive.

But still, he felt tears collecting behind his closed eyelids. His heart felt like a leaden weight in his chest, even though the trouble between them had passed. I'm nothing but a fool for you, but I don't care, I'll always be here loving you with all I've got... Rather than feeling a step closer to relinquishing Yunho, he felt himself more hopelessly in love than before. In spite of everything, a part of him wanted Yunho to recognize his heart in every way, beyond just the music and the words he wrote. He wanted to feel Yunho's heart more than just in the strings of his guitar, but he couldn't. People like him weren't supposed to be in love this way, and had to time and time again swallow it back and say nothing in the face of the one they loved.

Jaejoong's eyes were still closed, but he could hear Yunho leaning forward by the creak of the bedsprings. “Can you not be mad at me anymore, Jaejoongie?” Yunho whispered. “I really hate it.”

Jaejoong nodded, still leaving his eyes closed. “I hate it, too. It was my fault. I was the one who misunderstood you so badly.”

“No, it's not just you. I feel like I'm not grasping your heart very well either. We were both being stupid.” He squeezed his hands. “Could you open your eyes now? You'll keep misunderstanding if you can't see me, and I have something I need to ask you.”

Jaejoong opened them obediently, exposing their slight dampness to Yunho. Yunho's own eyes were soft, but still a bit uncertain. They still couldn't look at him the way they had before. Perhaps they would never be able to go back now.

“The other day... Was part of the reason you were so upset with me...” Yunho trailed off, then sighed. “Ah, it's no good now. I keep thinking you'll change your mind any second and throw something in my face. I think I would feel better if we worked on your song for awhile until I feel like we're back to normal.”

“I'm sorry,” Jaejoong said softly. “I'm not planning on snapping now, but I'll sing it for you. The whole way through.”

Yunho picked up his guitar and played a few chords. What was he going to ask?, Jaejoong wondered. Does he know I talked to Minhee? Does he want me to stay away from his ex-girlfriend, or is there something else that's bothering him?

While Yunho was warming up, thunder began roaring outside and the rain came pouring down. It made him feel better that the plants were protected under their cages and cloches, though he was sure Auntie Minjung was downstairs feeling restless as the wind howled. Jaejoong glanced over at Yunho. His clothes weren't wet anymore, but his hair had dried windswept and out of place. Absently, he reached out to flatten it down with his hand.

Yunho stopped playing for a full moment after that, simply gazing at Jaejoong with the new, uncertain look in his eyes. “What is it?” Jaejoong asked, feeling nervous all over again. “Do you not like it when people touch your hair?”

“Not that...” Yunho reached up to touch the same spot Jaejoong had. “I don't know what it is.”

“Hmmm?”

“I don't know,” Yunho repeated. “ I really don't know.” He shook his head, as if trying to come to his senses. “Come on, let's just sing. Let's do something for once today that makes absolutely perfect sense.”

"I just can't stand to think
What my days will be
Without you by my side
I just can't breathe
It don't matter what they say
I know nobody
Can ever take your place"