Title : a case of you and me
Prompt-# : 4
For : @ onkeybum_
Pairing : Jonghyun/Taemin + a teeny tiny mention of Jonghyun/Jaejoong
Author : Anonymous until reveals
Word count : 4,522
Rating : PG-13
Warnings : mentions of abuse and (mostly internalized) homophobia
Summary : After they die people get to revisit the moments of their lives they regret. Jonghyun and Taemin get to do it together.

The last thing Taemin remembers are the fast approaching headlights. Then more light and a silhouette of a man that whispers something calm and reassuring - Taemin’s ears are buzzing too much to understand him, though. All of that makes the flash of an image of him sprawled on the concrete with blood pooling around him even the more weird.

He knows, on some subconscious level, that he’s dead.

As his eyes adjust to the whiteness around him he notices the silhouette is, indeed, a man. He’s dressed in dark colors, a stark contrast against all the whiteness. He has an impressive pokerface but his features still seem to provoke trust, somehow. He looks like someone you’d tell all your secrets to.

There’s another guy there and Taemin almost misses him - he’s dressed in an entirely white suit and he kind of melts into the background. He has a notepad in his hand and waves it in Taemin’s direction.

“Hi there, child.”, smiles the man in white. “I’m assuming he’s Taemin?” The question is directed at the guy who brought Taemin here. He nods. “Great, great. I’m - well, call me Jinki, my name is too complicated for your pretty human brain anyway. I’m assuming dear old Minho here never introduced himself, of course.” Jinki glares at the other man - Minho and he shrugs.

“My job is to guide them here, not to make friends with everyone.” Minho shoots an apologetic glance at Taemin and Jinki starts to say something but before he manages anything another two men materialize a few feet from them. They make quite the entrance, mainly because one is on his knees, wheezing and the other is holding him by the collar of his coat. The one standing is sporting the most impressive face Taemin has seen in his life. He also glares daggers at Taemin, for some reason.

“I have a case four for you.” he points at Jinki and Jinki just blinks at him.

“Oh. We haven’t had a case four in a while.”

“Yup. But now we do.” the guy says. “Which does not mean I suddenly ran out of things to do, so see ya.” He seems to notice Minho’s presence then and his eyes light up. “Oh, Minho, perfect. You could move your lazy for once and help me.” He grabs Minho’s sleeve and before Minho can verbalize the protest that’s obvious in his expression, they just… fade away.

Jinki sighs. “Okay, child, what’s your name?” He smiles kindly at the newcomer as he waits for a reply.

“Jonghyun,” the guy says and his tone is halfway between confused and very, very irritated. “Don’t bother with me, I never wanted to be here in the first place.”

“Yeah, well, nobody ever wants to.” Jinki starts as he flips through his notepad, “Tough luck, though, because you are.” He flips some more pages, then some of them flip back on their own and Jinki narrows his eyes. “Oh. There you are, you’re in Kibum’s area. But you’re early.”

Jonghyun glares at him.

“Okay!” Jinki claps his hands and his kind smile is back. “I haven’t done this in a while, but I suppose this is one of the things one does not simply forget how to do. I, as you might have gathered, am sort of a gatekeeper. My job here is to guide you two to the place where your souls will get a second chance to resolve things that might otherwise keep you on earth. In other words, you’ll be revisiting moments that you might regret. Or want to change.

“Great.” Jonghyun says and the sarcasm is almost scathing. Jinki ignores him.

“Isn’t this something a person should do on their own, though?” Taemin asks. It doesn’t bother him too much, but Jonghyun doesn’t seem like the best company to share your life’s mistakes with.

“It usually is. But since the two of you are a case four – no, I will not tell you what a case four is, you have to figure that on your own – you get to do it together.”

“Great.” Jonghyun says again and this time Jinki gives him a look.

“This is happening whether you want it or not, child. See you on the other side!”

With this, Jinki disappears, along with the bright place. They end up in a hallway with six doors – some of them are just regular house doors, some look fancy and some are just plain weird.

“I assume our lives are behind the doors.” Jonghyun says to no one in particular. “Really, that’s just great.”

They stare ahead – at the doors, sometimes at each other. Jonghyun looks wholly unbothered.

“So… What’s your name?” Taemin asks and immediately wants to facepalm. He already knows that, yes, but Jonghyun is anything but helpful on the conversation front and they need some sort of team work to start happening soon. It’s not his fault.

Jonghyun makes a face at him. “You already know that.”. And yeah, okay, maybe Taemin deserved that, but it’s not his fault he missed the conversing with grumpy ghosts 101 classes at school.

“Okay, then where are you from?” At this Jonghyun stares at him pointedly. “Hey, for all I know Kibum’s “area” might be on the other side of the world!”

Jonghyun sighs. “No, it’s Seoul. You really drew the short straw here, you know. Or maybe I did. My life is ing full of stupid decisions and now I get to relive them with company.”

“Think of it as a second chance with the prospect of emotional support.” Taemin says. He can be positive for the two of them. “Now, let’s get this thing started. Do you have any preference for a door?”

Jonghyun shrugs and picks the one nearest to him. It’s a light blue one, the upper end fading into white. He tries the handle, and when it doesn’t budge Taemin tries it too, pushing Jonghyun’s hand out of the way. Unlike Jonghyun, Taemin doesn’t even need to push the handle. The door opens the moment Taemin’s fingers touch it.

*

They step into a house. There’s a short hallway with two doors and a staircase leading down. A teenage Taemin runs up the stairs and slams one of the doors open. It takes a while to realize this is, in fact, teenage Taemin – this one has an unfortunate bowl cut and, a noticeable case of acne and his face is blotchy red. Present-day Taemin hesitates for a second before he follows him. Jonghyun follows, too and when young Taemin breaks down in tears, Jonghyun squeezes the older one’s hand.

They watch in silence for a few minutes, before Taemin speaks. “This should be the day of the auditions for a talent show I wanted to sign up for. I wanted in really bad and I passed the pre-auditions, I was so excited. As you can probably tell, I missed the actual auditions. I signed up for it the next few years as well, but I didn’t even pass the pre-rounds then.”

Taemin turns around, leaves his sixteen-year-old self-crying in his room and starts down the stairs. Jonghyun’s quiet footsteps follow right behind.

“This is your chance then, right? You can make yourself go – you can see what you missed.”

They reach the end of the staircase and Taemin smiles in the direction of the room on the right. When they reach the actual room, it turns out to be a bedroom. There is an older woman asleep in the bed.

“Nah,” Taemin goes to the woman and gently her hair. Jonghyun stays in the doorway. “This is my mom, she was very sick at the time. Someone had to take care of her and our relatives lived pretty far away. My dad left when I was little.” They stay quiet after that, with Taemin his mother’s hair and Jonghyun watching him from the doorway. After some time Taemin sighs, and walks backwards towards the door, eyes locked on his mom’s face. “I know why I did what I did here. I don’t regret any of it and I wouldn’t change it, either.”

It starts slow, from a corner of the ceiling. The room falls apart piece by piece, like a picture in the sand blown away by the wind. When it fades away completely, they find themselves in the hallway again, the blue door now gone. Jonghyun says nothing when Taemin tries to subtly wipe his eyes with his sleeve.

They take a moment, just standing there. It’s silent, until Jonghyun says “What happened then?”

Taemin takes his eyes off the wall where the door used to be and smiles at him. “Oh, mom got better. She felt so bad she took a second job and signed me up for ballet lessons with an old friend of hers the next year. The lady kind of fell in love with me and took me as her assistant as soon as I graduated college.”

“You could have been in a pop band or something, though.” Jonghyun mutters as they slowly walk to another door.

“Hm?” Taemin says as he looks at the door handles one by one. “I wouldn’t have fallen in love with teaching then. In the next life, I suppose.”

They stop in front of a door in the middle of the hallway whose bottom looks overgrown by weeds. There’s something sickly yellow on the handle. It looks like a skin disease. Jonghyun pokes it with a disgusted expression but Taemin pushes his hand away and pushes the door open. “I feel like I should say sorry,” he says to Jonghyun’s raised eyebrow. “This one’s mine again.”

*

They stumble into a little park – more like a garden in the middle of what seems to be a quiet little town – the streets are way too empty for it to be anything else. There are a bunch of kids running around but Taemin pays them no mind as he grabs Jonghyun’s hand and tugs him toward a tall building.

Jonghyun follows more out of surprise, than anything. “How did you know it was yours?”

“The door handle. You’ll see.”

They go around the building, then pass another one before they reach a tiny square. It’s just as empty as the rest of the town, safe for the people in the yard of the house opposite where they stand. Taemin takes him to a line of trash cans and Jonghyun almost steps on a bunch of kittens hidden behind them. He immediately notices how Taemin knew. One of the kittens is almost all the way covered in the same yellow thing the door handle was.

The children come around the corner shortly after and find the kittens as well. They’re extatic. The people from the house shout at them to take the kittens to the river so they can have some water and not die. It’s ridiculous, the kittens have a way bigger chance here, but the kids are kids – they can’t be older than ten each – and they each grab a kitten. The kid that ends up with the sick kitten pouts and sulks, but that phases no one. They set off presumably for the river. Taemin follows them quietly and – of course, of course the kid with the sick kitten is a ten-year-old Taemin.

They follow the kids up the street and then to the left and, somewhere in between one overgrown backyard and the next, the kids start arguing. Little Taemin keeps sulking about his kitten and one of the other kids tells him to just leave it in the grass. And Taemin does. He hesitates, yes, but in the end he just carefully puts the kitten on the side of the road and takes off after his friends.

“This has always haunted me, you know. I never forgot.”, present-day Taemin says as he picks up the kitten, no hesitation whatsoever, and keeps walking after the children. Jonghyun follows. “I kept thinking about this when I was growing up – those people, the elders, they just wanted us to get rid of the kittens for them. And I took this one’s chance at dying – or surviving, who knows – with its brothers and sisters. Not only did I completely fail at helping it live, but I took it away from its family too. I felt bad about this my entire life.” The kids really do leave the kittens by a small river and go off to play. Taemin carefully puts the sick kitten among the rest and smiles at them as the view starts fading into the hallway walls.

He turns to Jonghyun with a self-deprecating smile. “You probably think it’s stupid.”

This time, Jonghyun smiles back. “No, not at all.”

*

The next door opens to a back alley. Jonghyun snorts but it doesn’t sound amused at all.

“Getting right to business, I see.”

It’s dark but there are a few people and a lot of noise and Taemin grudgingly identifies some of it as bones breaking and screams of pain. He closes his eyes and tries to not show how much it bothers him. It appears to be unsuccessful as Jonghyun takes his hand and drags him away from the alley and into a better lit street.

“Is this you there? The one getting beaten?” Taemin asks and tries to convince himself it’s alright. Jonghyun is standing next to him, whole and unharmed – which is probably not the right word, since they are both dead, but the point stands.

“It is.” Jonghyun replies in a perfectly calm voice. “I’m pretty sure this one lead to me being here, too.”

Taemin stares at him. “You could try to – I don’t know, change something. You can’t tell me it doesn’t bother you at all.”

“Why should it?” Jonghyun’s voice is a lot calmer than someone witnessing his own death should be. “I didn’t have much to lose at that point. I made a life out of bad decisions and it’s no one’s fault but my own I ended up here. It was probably a suitable ending.”

The slap sounds louder than the screaming in the back. Jonghyun looks startled.

“You are a giant ing .” Taemin says, and he barely recognizes himself. “Don’t you dare give me the “I deserved it” attitude. Nobody does. You can’t just take every ty thing that happens to you and blame yourself or a higher power or what –the- -not and leave it be. You fight or you never really lived at all. Maybe if you’d tried now we’d be revisiting your Grammy wins, but you’ll never know, will you?”

Jonghyun rubs a hand on his cheek that should’ve been red but – they are dead, and it isn’t. The moment falls away and Taemin angrily shoves the next door open.

*

The next door is rather… ordinary. It’s heavy and wooden but besides that, nothing particularly stands out about it. Still, Jonghyun takes a sharp breath. Taemin pushes the handle.

The room is smoky but well lit. There’s Jonghyun – a Jonghyun aged very close to the one next to Taemin. He’s twirling a cigarette between his fingers, occasionally flicking the ash into his own hand.

“Remember how I told you I sang at a jazz club?” Taemin nods and waits for Jonghyun to continue. It takes a while. “It was a dingy place, a lot of bad people visited it. Sometimes the other singers made extra cash… pleasing clients in the back.”

Taemin takes a moment to process this. “Have you?”

“A few times. It’s not a place where you find friends, not really. The other singers were closed off and - weird. Broken, I don’t know. I never made any effort to get to know them. And then there was him.”

As if summoned, someone walks in, passing right through them. At first Taemin is convinced this is a woman, one of those dolled up fancy jazz ladies he’s seen in the movies. Then she takes off her wig and it turns out she is a he. Jonghyun smiles next to Taemin, while the one with the cigarette gives the other man a mildly disgusted stare.

“Do you really have to dress like this?” This moment’s Jonghyun says with same mild disgust.

The man sighs. “For the millionth time, Jonghyunnie. I don’t. But I like it.”

“Aren’t you afraid, though? Of the men outside, of- I don’t know, God?”

“The fear excuse only gets you so far before hating yourself gets tiring,” the man says as he takes off his heels, then the dress and changes them for pants and a rather fancy looking shirt. “If I don’t love myself, how can anyone? God. Or you.” The last words are whispered with a smile in Jonghyun’s ear, but he flinches away.

“I don’t love you.”

“Of course you don’t.” The man looks hurt for a second but it quickly disappears behind another smile. Taemin wonders how many of those smiles were genuine.

“What’s his name?” Taemin asks his Jonghyun as the one from this moment storms out of the room.

“Jaejoong. He saw something in me, I still wonder what it was. I didn’t deserve him.” He moves closer to Jaejoong, brushes his jaw with the tips of his fingers. Jaejoong has given up on smiling now that he’s alone and his expression is sad, disappointed. Hurt.

When the room falls away and they end up in the hallway again, Jonghyun keeps his hand raised for a few seconds longer, a face that was no longer there.

*

The next door all white – like the ones you see on TV, in the houses of big happy families. It leads them to another hallway. Jonghyun’s eyes widen and he immediately takes a step back, but the door is already gone. There are kids running, much like the second moment they visited, only there are just two boys now. They look about the same age, too – and Taemin recognizes little Jonghyun. He’s different, so different from the Jonghyun shaking next to him – the kid’s cheeks are round and full where Jonghyun’s are hollowed and there’s a light to little Jonghyun’s eyes where there’s emptiness – and a hint of fear – in the older version.

The boys run down the stairs and Taemin moves to follow them, but Jonghyun just stands there, frozen.

“Are you-”

“Yes.” Jonghyun interrupts and starts walking before Taemin can even figure out how to end the question. Are you okay? Are you sure you want to do this? Are you afraid?

Instead Taemin just shuts his mouth and follows. They reach the kids when the one that is not Jonghyun starts pulling an older man’s sleeve. Older Jonghyun is still like a statue next to Taemin and he hesitates, but in the end wraps a hand around Jonghyun’s wrist in hopes of providing some sort of support.

“Daddy, daddy!” not-Jonghyun says to the man, “Can I marry Jonghyunnie when we grow up?”

Taemin can see the man’s eyes narrow and the friendly smile fall off his face. The kids see it too. “You know you can’t son. God doesn’t love boys that like other boys.”

Jonghyun still stands frozen as the kids go back upstairs and keeps being frozen when the boy that is not Jonghyun comes down the stairs and the older man goes up instead.

The moment he is out of sight Jonghyun’s body sags and he start shaking uncontrollably. Taemin doesn’t hesitate this time – he wraps Jonghyun in a hug as tight as he could without hurting him. It takes a few minutes for the moment to start falling away. Jonghyun lets out a quiet sob.

“Is this why…”

“Yes. His dad gave me a talk, told me I’m not allowed to play with his son anymore, told me- other things. They sent him away. He wouldn’t even look at me when he eventually came home. I know it’s stupid to blame all my dumb life decisions on this moment but- It took me so long to recover, to accept myself. I couldn’t come out to my family, both of them had died before that and the worst part is- I think they wouldn’t have minded. They probably wouldn’t have been happy, per say, but they would have accepted me. And I couldn’t.”

“Shh,” Taemin whispers.

By the time they are back in the hallway Jonghyun has extracted himself from Taemin’s hug and they’re both pretending nothing happened.

*

“Can we just- take a second. Like, we can go on if you want I just-”

“Of course, sure,” Taemin hurries to reply and pretends not to notice how Jonghyun’s shoulders sag in relief. He sits, leaning against the wall opposite of the next door. Taemin joins him.

“Talk about something.” Jonghyun speaks again. His voice is muffled in his hands and Taemin racks his brain for something that would cheer up the atmosphere.

“My first love,” Jonghyun snorts but Taemin ignores him and continues, “She was a year older and I pined for her for years. I joined every club she did and sent her anonymous chocolates for Valentine’s and all that stuff.” Jonghyun keeps quiet but the shaking has gone down, so Taemin takes it as a green light to go on. “She showed up to one of my dance recitals and we got talking, one thing led to another, we dated for a while and a few weeks before her birthday I found out she was cheating on me with the one of the teacher assistants. I hooked up with her brother as a revenge.”

Jonghyun stares at him for a full minute before he bursts out laughing. “You are a ing liar, this is so one of those romcoms everybody pretends to hate, you are fooling no one, mister.”

Taemin laughs too. “I got you to smile, didn’t I?”

“You did.” Jonghyun’s voice is back to an empty tone but it sounds forced now, and Taemin can see the smile lurking in the corners of his lips. “What really happened?”

“She never noticed me. She did go to one of my recitals but it was to watch her brother. His name was Jongin and I did try to get close to him so I could get close to her but we ended up dating for three years instead.” Taemin smiles at nothing in particular. Jonghyun stares. “We used to turn off all the lights in the dance studio and dance relying purely on instinct and each other.”

“Why?”

“Hm?”

“Why dancing of all things?” Jonghyun asks and his voice is quiet – a lot quieter than ten seconds ago. “I’ve never really- considered it. As a way of art. I know it is, of course, it just… seemed somehow optional. Secondary. I don’t know.”

“I suppose,” Taemin takes a moment to think about it. Why really? “It just felt right. I imagine it’s like what you must feel when you sing. The stage is all the same you know – the feeling. It demands. You give it your voice and I give it my body.”

The silence sets in once again.

“I’m sorry.” Taemin whispers. “For what I said earlier. I wish I’d been there. For you.” Maybe Jonghyun heard him, maybe he didn’t. A few seconds later there’s a quiet,

“Let’s go.”

*

The next door opens to a flower shop. It has Taemin behind the counter – present-day Taemin, or at least one that is very close to the age he died. Taemin freezes next to Jonghyun and doesn’t even attempt to follow the Taemin of this moment when he hurries out the door.

Jonghyun opens his mouth to ask but Taemin beats him to it.

“This is the day. The day I… That I… Well.” There are car horns blaring somewhere outside now, a few faint screams and the sound of police sirens a few minutes later. The passiflora starts fading where it’s weaved around the upper corners of the shop window. “You know, up until now I thought I’m pretty okay with the whole dead thing – but I- I don’t think I am.” Jonghyun’s fingers wrap themselves around Taemin’s wrist, then around his shoulder and then his other hand joins in a full-blown hug when Taemin starts shaking in silent sobs.

When Taemin calms down the only thing left of the room is the floor they’re sitting on. But the hallway is nowhere to be seen. “Great.” Taemin laughs humorlessly as they watch the corners of the floor start falling away. “I possibly got us stuck in who-knows-where just because I’m too much of a coward to see my own death.”

“Don’t,” Jonghyun mutters, and it’s the softest Taemin’s heard him speak yet. “I can’t – no, no one can blame you for being scared of that. I think I’d be, too if I’d actually been sober when it happened. Hey,” Jonghyun continues, louder, when Taemin stays quiet for too long, “Why were you even there? I mean, I thought you said you teach ballet?”

“I do.” Jonghyun is about to prompt him to continue, but Taemin does so on his own, “Remember the brother I told you about? The one I dated. Jongin?” Jonghyun nods and Taemin smiles “He had some family emergency and asked me to take a shift for him. He got this job a few months back and he loved it, he loved the flowers, I couldn’t just say no. I was running late for the ballet school and… yeah.” They stay silent for a while, then Taemin adds “I wish I could have taught that last lesson.”

The flower shop is all gone now and when Jonghyun jumps to his feet everything around them is a big black nothing. “Come on,” he says, his tone a little too cheerful to be fully sincere but Taemin gets up anyway. “You can teach me.”

“What? No, you don’t have to-”

“I know I don’t have to,” Jonghyun interrupts. “I want to. Besides – I’ve always wanted to learn to dance. Ballet is a good start, even if it’s a little late.”

“Liar.” Taemin murmurs but the stubbornness never leaves Jonghyun’s face. “You sure?”

Jonghyun nods with hesitant smile and Taemin smiles back at him. He moves closer and shows Jonghyun a simple plié.

Turns out, Jonghyun is a surprisingly fast learner and neither of them notice when the black nothingness starts fading as well.

*

Jinki clears his throat. Jonghyun and Taemin jump away from each other. “So, do you know what a case four is now?”

They both stare at him. Jinki sighs.

“Sometimes,” a voice says behind them and Kibum laughs at their startled faces, “Sometimes souls fall for each other. Both figuratively and literally. Sometimes they get separated and sometimes they start chasing each other through lifetimes. Sometimes, when they can’t find each other for a really long time, we help.”

Taemin blinks at him. “This sounds like a badly thought out urban fantasy.”

Jinki laughs and the white space behind him slowly forms a huge, bright door. “Welcome home, children.”