Eleven
The Lifetime KidsTaemin, are you still awake?
-Old Man, 01:07
I know it's late but something happened, something bad
-Old Man, 01:07
I don't know what to do
-Old Man, 01:07
I don't think I can do this anymore
-Old Man, 01:08
Please Taemin, I need you
-Old Man 01:08
Please
Old Man, 01:36
•••
Lie;
And later, I would lie.
Lips tugged apart by falsehood,
Let me speak your name –
Death, death, death –
Lips tugged apart by falsehood,
Let me speak your name –
Death, death, death –
An enchantress.
But I will never face her,
Immortal, God I am,
When later, I will lie.
But I will never face her,
Immortal, God I am,
When later, I will lie.
•••
Everything was white.
A clinical dysphoria swaddled Taemin’s limbs as his eyelashes fluttered, the light almost drawing ridges into his sclera. The scent of bleach and depression inebriated the pristine room as he squinted, heavily, nostrils flaring and body almost contracting beneath the cream sheets.
A hospital ward.
At first, he tilted his head leftwards, trying to rid the creak in his neck. The cerulean curtains were drawn, still hammocks under the buzz of the electric lights. Stiffly, confusedly, Taemin propped himself up somewhat, eyes clung to those curtains as if struck in an unvarying hypnosis. His entire body was numb, devoid of feeling but for the warm, suffocating press of the sheets against his skin. Whenever he moved, there was a faint tingle, but it dimmed just as his wavering vision.
Confusion invalidated his every motion.
Taemin tilted his head right, and his heart stuck still. In the private, closed ward, a chair sat by his bedside, and on that stiff chair, a man slept. His breath was inaudible, face the picture of calm quiescence. Tiredness clung to each feature he possessed, as if an exorcism of sleeplessness, even as he dozed. There was something bedraggled about his appearance also, as if he hadn’t moved in days, brunette hair a tousled nest and lips chapped, purple. Taemin blinked at him, unable to understand why the man was there, why he slept so deeply, and why he was so quiet. The maknae wanted to whisper his name, but found his throat too parched to speak.
For an hour, he simply sat, still, and watched Jinki sleep.
As he watched, Taemin wondered many things. He was in a hospital – that much was clear in the self-contained ward, with its droves of medical equipment and air of bleached cleanliness – but he didn’t know how long he'd been there, and he didn’t know why. His experience was also nothing as he'd expected; with open eyes, there had been no rush of doctors, no buzzing machines, no rampant inspection. There were no nurses in sight, the only other soul that of the silent man beside him, who stirred only once, with a harsh inhalation. Nightmares.
Jinki’s eyes opened with an empty flutter. It seemed to take him a second to notice the fact he was not alone in his wakened state, and that he was watched intently by the patient before him. Jinki shifted solemnly, eyelids flickering, and then his lips parted, and his eyes glistened, and he gently breathed, “Taemin?”
Both men stared at each other, searching, understanding. Jinki’s eyes were deepened with worry, distress, lips downturned and eyebrows slanted.
“Hyung,” Taemin tried, voice shuddering dangerously, “what's going on?”
Jinki leant forward and buried his head into Taemin’s side, so close, so familiar, like brothers. Taemin stiffened, eyes dragged down to the wisps of Jinki’s soft hair. He was stoic, motionless, hands reaching up and clenching the sheets tightly. Never before had Taemin seen him so dissociated, and it replaced his impatient thirst for knowledge with a deep, unmoving worry. Tentatively, Taemin removed a hand from beneath the duvet, and began to Jinki’s hair.
“Sit up, hyung,” Taemin spoke gently, hand dropping weakly. He'd slept for what felt like a lifetime, yet his strength was so depreciated that he was mistaken in believing he had never been strong at all. Jinki did as instructed, eyes rimmed red. When he sat up, he gazed at Taemin with such forlorn emptiness, that the maknae couldn’t separate it from fiction. The entire situation was detached, it didn’t feel real, didn’t feel right. Emotions pierced to fleet, dispelling before gaining traction. Taemin couldn’t feel what he didn’t know, after all.
“Tell me why I’m here,” Taemin requested, voice unflinching.
“You really don't remember?”
Taemin shook his head.
“Look at your arm,” instructed Jinki. Taemin frowned, and glanced down at the arm he’d revealed from the covers to Jinki’s hair. It was pale, clammy, but otherwise unscathed.
“No,” Jinki dismissed lowly, “the other arm.” Hesitantly, Taemin removed his arm from beneath the covers and stared.
Everything came back as a cacophony.
His voice hitched in his throat as his eyebrows widened, and then his body jerked, an impulse, leg jolting out and kicking the sheets. Pain.
“Taemin!" Jinki exclaimed, standing to grip the younger’s shoulders tightly, hooking in his nails and trying to get his attention. “Taemin…”
But Taemin was lost.
All reoccurred in flashes; a discord of pain, heat, darkness, convulsing beneath his skin as he tried so hard to forget what he wanted to recall. His arm – mottled in an array of purple, blue and yellow – was lacerated with cuts, like the patterned wing of a fly. He remembered that arm, the way it had hung out of the window, glass embedded from palm to shoulder, battered and gashed with little discrimination. But stronger, stronger, stronger yet, Taemin remembered tilting his head, the stoic cramp in his neck, and the man he'd viewed with two hollow, hollow eyes.
"Jonghyun," he gasped, eyes widening as Jinki attempted to sedate his actions – but no sedative would work. Everything was a confusion, dishonest and vague, ambiguously vapid and entrenched in dysphoria.
“It's okay,” Jinki tried, “it's okay,” and he hugged Taemin’s numb head to his chest as a frail whimper left the younger's lips, one good hand grappling at Jinki’s shoulder-blade, trying to assert the hug he could not feel. Frantic, morose, Taemin cried, nails sharp as they dug into Jinki’s skin.
The confusion became diluted in an eerie reprieve of silence.
Taemin all at once became aware of his breath against Jinki’s neck as the elder tried to hold him, became all too aware of the warm press of the singer’s body against his. A tired emptiness dragged the last reserves of strength away in the dregs of a cigarette’s smoke, and then Taemin was gently pushing Jinki back, creating space to breathe, to think, to understand.
“He's not-“
“No,” Jinki interrupted firmly. “No, Taemin.” The elder slumped back into his chair, effortlessly weary, fetid with stress. “Jonghyun’s alive.”
Taemin breathed such relief that he couldn’t help but expel, “Thank God,” with his exhalation, casting his tear-stained eyes to the ceiling, praying to nameless deities in nameless gratitude. Jonghyun was alive. Jonghyun was alive.
“You should sleep,” Jinki instructed, voice lacking any trace of thought. His imperative had been a weak one, but one Taemin knew worked only in his own favour. He didn’t want to sleep, however, no matter how languid he felt.
He wanted to see Jonghyun.
“I need to see he's okay,” Taemin began, voice tremulous as he tried desperately to configure his thoughts. Everything had dispersed, fleeting in an auburn sky, and he couldn’t get it back. “I-I need to, hyung.”
“Taemin, you know you can't,” Jinki muttered, head hung low, guilt tepid in his words. “Even if you could get out of this bed, it's well past visiting hours.”
“Then… How are you here with me?”
Jinki’s ears pricked and he raised his head, eyes wet, glistening.
“Because I told them that I'll never leave you.”
Taemin felt his skin grow cold. Those words… He recognised them. He recognised them from a different time, a different place, a different tongue. Cheeks paling, he dipped his head, too exhausted to fight the fight his mind raged for. I'll never leave you. Why did those words ring so poignant?
Tentatively, Jinki lifted Taemin’s hand and held it in his own, bequeathing warmth to the calloused skin so subtly. The maknae supposed he liked having his hand held in this way. It could have driven him to sleep, had he not been so deeply…
Taemin’s eyelids fluttered, thoughts dissipating in time with the syncopated rhythm of his own breathing. When his eyes shut completely, Jinki must have thought Taemin slept.
“I'm sorry,” the elder muttered.
All Taemin could do was frown.
i got a sudden burst of inspiration for this story... i really hope it lasts long enough that i can update Dx
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