Title: Freefall
Characters: Leeteuk/Kangin
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 2.876
Summary: It doesn’t take a genius to see that Jungsoo’s falling, but it’s Youngwoon who he grabs on to and from then on it’s no longer a question of getting grip, but more of letting go...or not.
A/N: So I was reading some LJ stories again and I came across the ending of the most amazing angsty fanfic I've ever read (SM Boarding School by tewki, for those who want to know.) and then that Summary line popped up in my mind and I just.. wrote all this. x] Took me one evening and today to finish and I think I'm pretty much in love with it. People often think too much into things, so I can say that the rating is not just because I don't describe anything but also because nothing happens. (<-- That's for all you pervs out there.) Having said that; enjoy?
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“She’s gone.” he says, and from the corner of his eye, he can see the other turn to look at him. “She left me. For good. Said she can’t take the pressure, the sneakiness. I told her from the start that it would be like that and she said it was fine. Now suddenly she quit on me.” His voice is rough, filled with annoyance, anger, disrespect. He huffs at the unreal feeling it all has and slams his hand on his pillow.
The next moment he’s crying, his disbelief taking the upper hand as he grasps the reality of what happened only hours before. Was it even hours? Maybe only thirty minutes at most. “Why?” he questions, kind of wanting the other to answer and kind of knowing he won’t. “Wasn’t I good enough for her? Did she meet someone new? Someone who treats her better than I do? I always paid when we went out, I always bought her those ridiculously fluffy fabric animals she asked for all the time, I even bought her that way too expensive coat she was dying to have. And now she drops me like this?”
It’s not exactly clear to him when his ramble gets interrupted because his sobs get too much, but there’s an arm around his shoulders and a hand ruffling his hair in a comforting way, so he crawls against the broad chest that is next to him and soaks the dark gray T-shirt with his tears until it feels like he’s got none left – which is about the moment when he falls asleep.
~*~
“I still don’t get it.” he randomly comments one day, some few weeks after the particular break-up. Youngwoon looks up from the sports page of the English paper he’s been staring at for a while to find out who won the tennis game played the previous day. He’s obviously not following what Jungsoo’s talking about.
“Don’t get what?” he asks mere moments later, his eyes darting back to the paper.
“Why she left me.”
Youngwoon sighs and gets up from the chair, walking out of the room. Jungsoo thinks he might have had enough of his nagging – any normal person would have, right? – or maybe he just wants to read the paper in silence. Perhaps he’s tired of seeing Jungsoo’s face day after day whenever he looks up. He’s about to blame himself for chasing Youngwoon out of a room that belongs to the younger as well, when the door opens again and his roommate walks back in, stuffing a beer in his hand.
“You think too much.” Youngwoon tells him as he takes a seat next to him on the bed, and he finds himself thinking that’s probably true. “Now drink up and get a grip. You sound like a girl whining about it all the time.” He figures that’s probably some good advice, not even realising the insult in the other’s words until he’s way passed his fifth beer, giggling over the smallest of things, and by the time he finds the will to complain about the insult, the inside of his stomach is already halfway out of his throat, making its way into the toilet.
It’s Youngwoon who cleans his face afterwards with a wet towel, telling him he looks horrible and grinning widely at that because he’s probably past his ninth beer as well. For a moment he wants to make a sarcastic comment, but there’s a cool towel on his forehead and a hand on his lower back, warming up that select space, and apparently his body decides to pass out right there and then.
~*~
He wakes up one day with a headache that rivals the one he had after four days of filming in the bright sunlight with hardly any sleep during the nights. He struggles out of bed, crawls towards the bathroom and empties the alcohol from his stomach. When he gets up, sloppily balancing himself with use of the window sill, the room turns around him, but he just giggles. There’s a smile on his face still as he brushes his teeth to get rid of the awful taste and when he enters the kitchen, he’s pretty sure no one notices he got drunk the night before – once again.
He manages to keep standing upright on his legs for the rest of the day, working through the schedules without anyone ever noticing how horrible he feels – maybe a stylist noona or one of the make-up team wonders if he’s tired because he looks rather pale but he probably doesn’t hear them anyway – but on the way to the car after Sukira, he collapses in the middle of the parking lot, Hyukjae’s hands under his arms the only things keeping him from hitting the ground.
When they reach the dorms, he’s already fallen asleep several times, but Hyukjae keeps poking him awake, afraid he’s got some terrible disease and will die if he closes his eyes. He only barely registers the arms pulling him out of the van, but then there’s a different pair of arms and a smell that he knows too well, so he clings to that strong neck and rests his head against the broad chest, falling asleep before they’re two meters away from the car.
~*~
“Why do you do it?” Youngwoon asks him one day, causing him to look up from the papers he’s been working with. He knows exactly what the other is talking about, but decides to pretend he doesn’t have a single clue.
“Do what?” he therefore asks, pulling his eyebrows together just enough to look like he’s wondering about the question, but not too much so he doesn’t seem annoyed. Youngwoon doesn’t take the act, though, and he scoffs and frowns disapprovingly.
“Drinking yourself knock out night after night.” he then says. “It’s been two months, you’d think you got over it by now, you know. You keep saying she’s just a girl, that it wasn’t anything special, yet here you are, drinking like a lovesick, broken-hearted fool.”
He figures he should be offended, but there’s something about the way Youngwoon looks at him, the way he’s not lecturing but merely stating, that makes him accept the insult as it is. So he shrugs, opens his mouth to say something, yet instead brings the bottle of beer to his mouth and empties the last bit. “Why do YOU do it?” he then shoots back when Youngwoon empties his own beer as well. There is no reply to that, only a new bottle thrown at him, which he catches surprisingly easily seeing that it’s the fifth one that evening.
After his sixth bottle he decides he’s not in it for the sissy beers, so he takes out his stash of soju and opens one of those. Youngwoon eyes it in silence, not opposing to it, but his expression shows he’s not really approving either. Yet the guy takes the bottle from Jungsoo when he offers it and in the end probably downs half or even more than half of the three bottles his stash still consisted of before that evening. By the time it’s 3 AM, they’re both laughing over nothing, sitting next to each other on his bed, the last bit of sanity disappearing from their brains.
He wakes up close to naked the next morning, the taste of Youngwoon still in his mouth and this time he runs for the toilet and empties his stomach for a whole different reason than just an overload of alcohol.
~*~
So he’s straight and three hundred percent sure of that, but he ended up half naked with his roommate and did.. whatever they did. Probably not much considering the amount of alcohol in his blood. With a bit of luck he passed out halfway into the first kiss or something. Youngwoon doesn’t remember a thing either, except for the terribly awkward waking up part. They decide to pretend it never happened, because that’s the best for everyone. At least they think so.
~*~
It takes five weeks before they risk drinking together again. Youngwoon stays far away on his own bed to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself, but it’s not like that precaution makes much of a difference, because four beers and a bottle of soju later, his roommate is next to him again, patting his back while he’s rather embarrassingly wailing like a baby. He doesn’t even know why he’s crying, just that it relieves him and he’s glad that Youngwoon’s there to comfort him.
He falls asleep that night with his head on Youngwoon’s chest, one arm around the younger’s middle, the other arm squished in between them. There’s something touching his butt, but he’s not sure if it’s the wall or Youngwoon’s hand and quite frankly, he’s too tired to care. When he breathes in, his senses are filled with the smell of his bed, Youngwoon and alcohol, and the first sincere smile he shows in months lingers on his lips as he sinks into oblivion.
~*~
Time passes. Days, weeks, months, schedules. All he knows is falling. Falling so deep he’s not sure whether he’ll ever be able to get back out of the hole again. There’s Youngwoon who makes life a little easier to bear, with the strong arms that hold him and the broad chest he can cry against, but he’s not sure if Youngwoon’s helping him up or if he is pulling the other down. He’s drowning. In work, in life, in alcohol, but most of all in his own mind. There’s no more room for common sense, no more room for thinking over what’s right and what’s wrong.
And so he wakes up one night with the distinct memory of kissing Youngwoon who is still lying next to him, and though he’s not sure why, he does it again, waking the other from his comatose sleep with the butterfly kisses pressed all over his face, neck and shoulders. There’s hands involved too, somewhere on that broad chest and those strong arms, and maybe there’s sweat too, or maybe he’s crying, he’s not too sure which one it is. They are pressed so tightly together that his ribs hurt from the pressure Youngwoon’s putting on them, but he doesn’t say it.
They pass out in the middle of it all, his lips against Youngwoon’s jaw, the other’s fingers in his hair. When they wake up again, Youngwoon doesn’t remember a thing anymore, and he himself is off to puke the terrible taste out even before he’s fully awake.
~*~
“Life is great!” he lies to the camera with a laugh so fake he’s sure even strangers would notice. When he looks at his members, they’re all nodding and Youngwoon has a hand on Hangeng’s shoulder, whispering something in his ear that makes the Chinese man laugh. Jungsoo doesn’t know what the other is thinking, but when Youngwoon looks up with a big grin on his face, he wonders for a moment that maybe he’s got things all messed up and life is actually not so bad if he would only choose to see it. Then he turns his head back to the camera and the moment is gone.
~*~
“I love you.” Youngwoon tells him one day, some six months after the break-up, and he feels his breath hitch, flashbacks of the kissing and the touching taking over his mind. He’s already imagining Youngwoon doing everything on purpose, but then the younger continues. “You’re my closest hyung and I really love you, but you have to stop this. It’s not healthy. You’re killing yourself and you and I both know that’s true so don’t deny it. Why do you still do it? Are you still heartbroken about that girl? Because really, it wasn’t that huge of a relationship. You need to get a grip, Teuk.” he lectures, before saying the words that really matter. “Stop drinking.”
He thinks it’s mostly because of the suddenness of it all, or maybe it is because he always thought Youngwoon understood. Whatever the reason, he snaps, breaks, lashes out. He says every bad thing he can come up with, and Youngwoon just sits there and takes it. By the end of it, he’s crying, but he’s still hissing insults and then he hits where it cuts deep.
“What right do you have to talk anyway? You’re the one who pushed that bottle in my hand in the first place. You’re the one who’s drinking just so much that at one point you’re too drunk to remember how you almost rape me.” he bites, falling silent after that because he’s already regretting the words as they’re still leaving his mouth. Youngwoon stiffens, face turning emotionless and the next thing he knows, there’s a hand gripping his collar tightly and he’s got trouble breathing right.
“That’s not true.” Youngwoon hisses in his face, more desperate than angry. “Tell me that’s not true.”
He shies away from the touch, stares at the other with wide eyes, too shocked by the fact that Youngwoon is responding so heavily to reply. The other immediately lets go of him again, however, and moves back, face ashen, eyes flashing over his face, trying to find proof of the words he just said. He still can’t speak, can’t move, sits frozen on his bed, staring, and then Youngwoon goes, bolting out of the room and throwing the door closed behind him.
~*~
“Jung! Jungsoo wake up!” a voice pries him out of his passed out state. He refuses to wake up, doesn’t want to get up for schedules, doesn’t want to get up for anything. The memory of Youngwoon’s pale face is still vivid and he doesn’t really want to remember it. He’s sad he wasn’t drunk yet when that happened, because otherwise he might have forgotten by now. “Jung, you have to get up. Kangin’s been in an accident.”
He shoots up so fast everything’s spinning around him. Trying to keep balance, he grabs the wrist of whoever it is waking him up, but before he can ask what happened and if Youngwoon’s alright, he spots the younger sitting on the edge of his bed, back turned to him, and he remembers what it is to breathe. He allows himself a moment to recover from the sudden movement and then gives the young man next to him a decent look. It’s Heechul standing there, brows furrowed, expression not amused. He lets go of the other’s wrist and looks at Youngwoon again.
“He came back half an hour ago, said he ran his car into a parked taxi. He’s obviously drunk and he’s not listening to any of us. We need you to talk to him, Jungsoo, maybe he’ll listen to you, since you’re rooming together.” Heechul says, turning away and leaving after that, closing the door and all, obviously believing that Jungsoo will handle everything. It is then that he realises none of the members realise he’s the one who’s been messing up over the past six months and Youngwoon’s been the one picking up the pieces.
He stares at Youngwoon’s back from where he’s sitting, letting the memories of past months rush through him. For a while he just stares, but then he blinks and takes a new breath of air, only now realising he’s been holding his breath. Youngwoon looks tired, even from the back, even when his face isn’t visible. More than that, even, he looks exhausted. Devastated. It’s a sight he can’t bear to see and his heart clenches when he thinks of what he’s made the other go through.
“We should stop this.” he says, softly, but still understandable. “You were right.” And he was just too scared to admit it, but that wasn’t something he preferred saying out loud. “I’ve been a fool and you’ve tried so hard to help even though I didn’t want you to.” He balls his hands to fists in his blanket, clenching his teeth together as he scolds himself in his mind. “Let’s stop this.” he then concludes again, much more resolute than it had sounded before.
~*~
He’s been falling, tumbling down at an insane speed, desperately trying to grab on to something to stop himself from falling deeper, but finding nothing. Then at one point, Youngwoon took hold of his hand and he was sure he had found something to keep him up, until it turned out Youngwoon was merely falling together with him. He felt cheated at some point maybe, perhaps a little disappointed, but now he has decided to just go with it and see where he’ll end up.
He’s straight and three hundred percent sure of that. The same goes for Youngwoon. Yet they’re not shy of a hug every now and then, or even crawling in bed with the other because the night is cold and lonely. Neither has touched a drop of alcohol since the accident and even though it sometimes gets hard keeping up the good intentions, they manage. Youngwoon’s thinking of taking up his army duties, Jungsoo’s thinking of taking up his life.
All in all, life is not too bad, now that they choose to see it.
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