KPop: Universal Languages (Tao/Chen, PG-13) [2/5]

[maayacolabackup]

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The first night is excruciatingly humid. Tao lights the two lamps that Jongdae had noticed by the door earlier with a lighter, and puts one next to Jongdae’s bed, and the other next to his own.

It’s quiet, but not uncomfortable between them.

Jongdae plays with his new camera for a bit while Tao stretches, occasionally sighing at a particularly good one.

He’s so long and lean, Jongdae thinks. The light casts shadow along muscle, there’s a sheen of sweat on Tao’s skin. Jongdae watches, and then, without thinking, he snaps a photo. Tao looks up, surprised, and Jongdae smiles at him and waves the camera. Tao’s eyes shift from the camera to Jongdae a couple of times, before he shrugs and returns to stretching.

There’s no relief from the heat. Jongdae gets bored, but not bored enough to pull out his laptop or his textbook.

“Shower?” Jongdae says, in Korean, to Tao, and mimes spraying himself with water, and Tao’s face lights up with understanding.

“Ah,” Tao says, and then says something else Jongdae misses.

Jongdae puzzles it out as Tao stands.

“Come,” he says, in simple Mandarin, and Jongdae rises to his feet. Tao snags his lamp, and Jongdae copies him, grabbing his lamp, too, as well as his shower bag, where he’s stuffed underwear and shorts, and then walks out into the night. Jongdae follows, stepping outside their room. Bugs fly up to circle around the lamp, and Jongdae can barely make out Tao’s shape in front of him. “Come.”

Jongdae likes the lilt in his voice on the ‘L’, like the word lai itself is coaxing Jongdae along.

Suddenly, Jongdae trips, over a root or a weed, or maybe nothing, but he stumbles. He holds the lamp up, so that he doesn’t break it, and prepares to fall. But something catches him around the waist, and then Jongdae is hauled up until he’s standing straight again. Jongdae blinks, not quite sure why he isn’t on the ground, flat on his face. Then he registers the warmth of fingers across the flat of his belly, and a strong arm wrapped around his torso.

Tao’s arm is hot, and sticks to Jongdae’s tank-shirt. He smells faintly, Jongdae thinks, of cedar, and it’s strange comfort to be pressed up against him like this.

“Okay?” Tao asks, and Jongdae can’t make out his face. He holds his lamp a little higher, and Tao’s face is scrunched with amusement.

“Okay,” Jongdae replies, and Tao nods. Jongdae expects him to pull away, but he doesn’t. Instead, he settles his palm on Jongdae’s hip and pulls him a little closer. Then Tao says something else in Mandarin, that Jongdae can’t figure out, but it probably means ‘you’re a massive klutz so I’m going to walk you to the shower so you don’t die.’

“Thank you,” Jongdae says, and he doesn’t hesitate over the foreign syllables this time. Tao’s fingers brush across the bit of skin between Jongdae’s jeans and his shirt, and it sends a tiny shiver across Jongdae’s skin. Jongdae figures it’s just the difference in temperature between Tao’s skin and his own that causes it.

The showers, it turns out, are way in the back of the compound. “Why so far?” Jongdae mutters to himself, as Tao’s arm slides from his waist, dragging across Jongdae’s back. Jongdae licks his lips, and misses the warmth.

Tao nudges him with his elbow, then points. Jongdae narrows his eyes at him, trying to make out what Tao’s pointing at in the dark, but it turns out he doesn’t have to see; he can hear. There’s the trickling sound of running water.

“The water is here. That’s why the shower is back here.” He sets the lamp down. “I see.” The light from Jongdae’s lamp lights up the room, where there are two spigots.

“Okay?” Tao asks, and Jongdae nods. Tao pats him softly on the shoulder and fades back into the darkness, like he was never there, and Jongdae stares, for a moment, at where he’d been standing.

“Oh my god, he’s basically an actual ninja,” Jongdae whispers, and then shakes himself, because he’s being silly.

The water is lukewarm, which is fine, because the last thing Jongdae wants is hot water. As he scrubs the sweat from his skin, he lingers, a bit, where he still feels the tingle of Tao’s callused fingertips grazing his side.

“You have problems, Jongdae,” he says to himself, aloud, and dumps a bucket of water over his head to flush the thought away.

When he gets back from washing, somehow managing not to take a dive into the grass, Tao shows him, with simple, physical instructions, how to put up the mosquito nets, chuckling as Jongdae tangles himself in the nets. Tao’s wearing pajama pants with pandas on them, Jongdae notes, as Tao moves closer.

“No, no,” Tao says, and he pulls the net free of Jongdae’s hair. He’s just as gentle as he was before, and Jongdae’s mouth is terribly dry. Tao’s laughing at Jongdae, but Jongdae’s laughing at himself, too, so it’s okay.

Tao makes sure Jongdae does it correctly before leaving Jongdae’s side, blowing out his lamp and collapsing into his bedding on the other side of the room.

Jongdae’s not sure if Tao’s a quiet sleeper, or if he’s just not asleep. He studies the shape of Tao, with the tweedy light of his own lamp, for a few minutes, then extinguishes it and tries to find sleep.

Jongdae sweats his way through his nightclothes and thin top sheet, and when he wakes up in the morning, his clothes are stuck to his skin. He stretches, and looks outside.

It’s early. The sun is low in the sky, and Jongdae stretches, getting the kinks out of his back. Tao is already gone. Jongdae finds himself disappointed.

He putters around for a few minutes, pulling out his laptop and plugging it in. He takes a few notes on the temple so far; remembering to write down how the temple gets its funding, and what sorts of things he ate. While not directly on topic, little details like that might be good to work into his first article.

He’d been told, in a later briefing, that one of the things he’s supposed to write about is the changes in Chinese martial arts… the gap between the traditional and modern. Jongdae doesn’t really have any idea about any of it, so he doesn’t know what sort of stuff he’ll need to include to make it interesting.

Maybe, he thinks, as he saves the word file, it’ll become more obvious to him later on.

He shuts his laptop and walks outside, into the yard. It’s not even past eight in the morning, Jongdae thinks, but it’s already sweltering, humidity a thick layer of moisture on his skin.

His first glimpse of the temple grounds in the morning leave him breathless. Mountains crawl up around him in every direction, surrounding the grounds of the temple like a protective wall, plush with foliage and plants. Jongdae remembers a lot of ups and downs while driving yesterday, and now it all makes sense.

“Good morning!” Jongdae hears, and he looks up to see Yixing, dark hair pulled back in a ponytail away from his face. “Sleep is okay?”

“Yes,” Jongdae says. “I slept well.” He didn’t, not really, but that’s not anything that anyone can fix.

“Breakfast?” Yixing asks, and Jongdae licks his lips.

“Yes,” he says, and Yixing grins, that dimple making another appearance. Jongdae wonders, slightly, if the other man is constantly up to something, or if that’s just the natural set of his eyebrows. “Please.”

“Come,” Yixing says, and he leads Jongdae into a new room in the temple’s main building, behind the room they’d eaten in last night. It’s a fairly modern kitchen, Jongdae notes. It’s only about twenty years out of date, but he’d expected forty, so it’s a pleasant surprise. “Chen cooks?”

“Not well,” Chen says, and Yixing scrunches his nose.

“Duizhang, too,” Yixing says. “Not well.” Jongdae raises an eyebrow.

“Driving, cooking, martial arts…” Jongdae says, and Yixing smiles.

“Duizhang is a warm person,” Yixing says, and Jongdae thinks dubiously back to Kris’s face, and how it seems like Kris is constantly fighting some kind of internal battle to emote. “He doesn’t have to be good. We like him.” Jongdae nods. “Eat this.”

Yixing shows Jongdae where the cereal is, and there’s milk, but it’s in a small pouch instead of a carton. Jongdae stares at it for a moment, and then decides not to ask questions he doesn’t want to know the answers to.

“Where’s-“

“Here,” Yixing says. “We will prepare. Big competition. We train all year.” Jongdae notices, for the first time, that Yixing is wearing clothes similar to the ones Jongdae had seen on Tao’s bedding yesterday. “Lu Han and Xiumin are there.” Yixing points through a doorway, opposite of the one they’d come in through. “Other rooms.”

Practicing, Jongdae thinks. Of course. He looks down at his bowl of cereal. Kris had mentioned that there’d be a competition.

“Where’s Tao?”

“Tao likes…” Yixing tilts his head. “Tao likes to practice away.”

“Away?” Jongdae takes a bite of the cereal. The milk tastes strange, but not a bad-strange.

“Yes,” Yixing says. “Because of his…” He says a word in Mandarin that Jongdae doesn’t understand. Jongdae shakes his head, and Yixing sighs, puffing out his cheeks and sticking out his lower lip. Then he takes both hands and swishes them through the air.

At first, Jongdae isn’t sure what’s happening in this terrible game of charades, but then it clicks. “Sword? Sword!”

“Yes,” Yixing says, and then says it again in Mandarin. Jongdae listens carefully, and repeats it to himself as he takes another bite of his cereal.

“Your Korean is really good,” Jongdae says, and Yixing squints at him.

“Your Mandarin is really bad,” Yixing replies, poking Jongdae in the arm. “Your eyes look like question marks. Practice.”

“Yes,” Jongdae says, feeling redness pool in his cheeks, and wonders what that even means—that his eyes look like question marks. “I promise.”

Jongdae washes his dish, and Yixing covers his mouth with his hand as Jongdae tries to put the bowl back in the wrong place. When the tiny cleanup is completed, Yixing scratches at the side of his face. “My practice time,” he says. “Look around.”

“But-“ Jongdae starts, but when he turns, Yixing has already disappeared, leaving Jongdae alone.

He wipes his wet hands on his jeans, and sighs. It’s true that he hadn’t gotten a chance to look around yesterday; night had fallen quickly, and Jongdae had been tired and full, and maybe a little too distracted by his roommate to wonder about the rest of the temple.

He goes from room to room, and then outside, exploring the grounds. The temple is small, but not tiny. It looks like it used to be a religious place, with the mediation rooms and the mildly neglected gardens that look like they might have been perfect for a solitary person’s quiet reflection. Nothing’s flat, either, Jongdae walking up and down stone stepways to get to and from different buildings. From the main building to Tao and Jongdae’s room, too, is down four stone steps, where their room has seemingly been built right out of a hill-face.

Jongdae stops when he finds Lu Han, sweaty and sprawled out in one of the larger rooms, bare feet covered in a thin layer of dirt and toes curling and uncurling as he stretches.

“Hey,” Jongdae says.

“Hi,” Lu Han says. “Did you eat?”

“Yeah,” Jongdae says. “Yixing helped me.” He sits down gingerly on the floor, taking in Lu Han’s special clothes that remind him, a bit, of a comic book or something; one of the ones for ten-year-old boys that Jongin likes to read. “You’re going to compete in this… competition, too?”

“All of us are, except for duizhang,” Lu Han says. “That’s why we’re here. Yixing and I have the same teacher, and he sent us out here. Xiumin came here all the way from Korea, like you, but he’s lived in China before. Zitao is… well, he’s special.”

Jongdae remembers Kris had said something similar in the car. “He’s like, really good, right?”

Lu Han chuckles. “You could say that.” Lu Han looks up at Jongdae through his damp bangs. “What do you know about the international competition?”

“Absolutely nothing,” Jongdae says, spreading his hands wide. “Only that they exist, and they’re in nine months.”

“Well,” Lu Han says. “It’s in Haikou. In Hainan Province. Every year, we compete against people from all over the world.”

“Wow,” Jongdae says. “That sounds… intense.” Jongdae can’t really imagine devoting his life to something to the extent that he trained all year for one competition, just to start all over again when it was done.

“Yeah,” Lu Han says, and his eyes twinkle. “Not for you?”

“Does it make you happy?” Jongdae asks. “To train like this?”

“Yes,” Lu Han says. “My parents don’t approve, but I wanted to do this my whole life. I tried to find a master for a long time, but finally I was scouted by one, when I least expected it.” Lu Han scratches his head. “He was Korean. So I went to Korea.”

“Ah,” Jongdae says. “What about Tao?” Jongdae bites down on his lip as soon as he asks, because maybe he sounds too interested.

Lu Han looks intrigued at that interest, which is the last thing Jongdae wants.

“It’s just… He’s very kind. Helpful.” Jongdae sighs. “I wish I could just ask him myself, but it’s…”

“What do you want to ask him?” Lu Han queries, noncommittally.

“I dunno,” Jongdae says. “Lots of stuff.”

“Well then,” Lu Han replies. “I guess you found your motivation to study Mandarin.”

Jongdae grins at him. “I was going to do that anyway.” He runs a hand through his hair. It’s damp with sweat, now, too. “Better than wushu.”

“Stand up,” Lu Han says, excitedly. “Wushu is fun.”

“No,” Jongdae says. “Whatever you’re thinking, it’s a terrible idea.”

“Why?”

“I’m hopeless. My only athletic skill is running very fast. I’m famous for my lack of hand-eye coordination. My nickname in college was ‘Dancing Machine’ because-“

“Relax,” Lu Han says. “I’ve taught five year olds how to do this.”

“Okay,” Jongdae says with resignation. “But I’m warning you.”

*

Jongdae groans when Tao pokes him with a toe. He’s lying on his stomach on his bedding, sprawled out like a starfish in an effort not to feel sore.

Tao says something quickly, and Jongdae thinks he catches Lu Han’s name, but none of the other words are anything but gibberish to him.

“My muscles,” Jongdae says. “Everything hurts.”

Jongdae’s not sure what he expects, but Tao straddling his thighs isn’t it. Tao is heavy, and in the already oppressive heat, his weight is like a thermal blanket across Jongdae’s lower half.

“What are you-“

“Shh,” Tao says, and Jongdae doesn’t know what’s happening, which is sadly becoming the eternal state of his life. But then Tao’s hands are pressing knowledgeably into his back, and Jongdae hisses as one of the knots between his shoulders is massaged. “Okay?”

“Yes,” Jongdae says, and it comes out as more of a moan than a word, but Tao just chuckles, and continues.

After a few minutes, Jongdae’s muscles are complaining less, and now he notices the way Tao’s thighs feel, on either side of his own, thick and firm, and the shape of Tao’s hands against his back. Even through the material of his shirt, he can feel he strength in those fingers, same as he’d felt it last night, when Tao had kept him from falling.

Jongdae’s heart is… speeding up, he notices, and it’s probably because it’s too hot, or because Jongdae hadn’t quite been expecting an impromptu massage from his new roommate this afternoon.

Jongdae sighs when Tao stops, his back like jelly. “Dinner,” Tao says, and Jongdae hadn’t heard the bell; maybe he’d been too wrapped up in his own thoughts.

“Dinner,” Jongdae mumbles, and Tao stands and steps away, offering Jongdae a hand as Jongdae sits up. His whole torso, but especially his back and arms, feel so much better. “I’m with Kris. This wushu business is not for me.”

Tao tilts his head as Jongdae speaks, and a smile quirks at his lips as hears wushu. Jongdae exhales frustratedly.

When they get to dinner, Tao immediately goes to Kris, tugging on his sleeve until Kris looks at him, face in that same painfully neutral expression. Tao speaks to him rapidly, and Kris looks over at Jongdae and then back at Tao, which makes Jongdae feel inexplicably nervous.

He sits down in the same place as yesterday, next to Xiumin, and Lu Han smiles cheerily at him. Jongdae kind of wants to give him the finger, but that’s more of a Jongin thing to do, and Jongdae tries to emulate as few of Jongin’s daily habits as possible, on principle.

Kris walks over to him, and Jongdae wonders if he’s done something wrong. “Tao says you need to stretch before you exercise, or you’ll hurt yourself. And that Lu Han should have told you that.” He puts a hand on his hip, and he towers over Jongdae, who feels like he should never sit down when Kris is in the same room, because he’s already short enough. “He was probably too busy doing his Bruce Lee impersonations to remember to tell you.”

Jongdae buries his face in his hands, and Yixing chokes on his water, coughing as Xiumin helpfully slaps his back.

Lu Han’s laughing, banging his hand on the table as he laughs. “I didn’t think he was going to be so hopeless, or I would have took him through a stretching routine myself, for sure.”

“I told you,” Jongdae says. “I really told you.” He forces his hands down from his face and rests them on his thighs. Everyone is looking at him. He curls his hands into fists as his blush gets deeper.

“But I didn’t believe,” Lu Han says, and even Kris has something Jongdae might think is Kris’s version of a smile making his face twitch. It looks a little like he’s being tasered, but it’s a start.

Jongdae forces himself to relax, and meets everyone’s eyes. When he gets to Tao, the steady, earnest look in his eyes cools Jongdae’s embarrassment. He feels his fists uncurling under Tao’s gaze.

“Don’t worry,” Yixing says. “Even if you are bad at something…” Yixing draws off, and one side of his mouth lifts deviously. “Duizhang will be worse.”

“Oh I know,” Jongdae says. “That’s one thing I am learning.”

“Hey,” Kris says, as Tao presses his shoulder against Jongdae’s in some strange, unexpected show of camaraderie. “Don’t get Chenchen to gang up on me, too.” He narrows his eyes. “I thought you were shy,” he says, and Jongdae grins. “But you’re not shy at all.”

“No,” Jongdae says. “Not really.”

Lu Han giggles as he translates for Tao, and Jongdae feels… welcome, in a weird way. Like this, maybe, is the right place for him right now, despite the challenges.

*

The first week turns into the second, and Jongdae learns more about the people he’s staying with, and what they actually do.

There are, he learns, tons of events at the international wushu competition. Barehanded events. Form events. Events with weapons or props. Events where you compete directly against others, and events where you’re only competing against yourself and your own execution of the forms.

It’s a whole new world for Jongdae, whose interest in martial arts has always been limited to the cinematic.

Still, Kris explains how it works when he’s between running errands. Jongdae tries not to think about the fact that Kris drives, like, all the time, and instead focuses on Kris’s comfortable and slightly stilted Korean as he elaborates on wushu, and how it had been turned into a competition in order to exert control over it—there’s what passes for excitement in Kris’s voice, when he speaks, and Jongdae guesses everyone is passionate about something.

Lu Han, Jongdae discovers, is not very childlike at all, despite his exaggerated, wide-mouthed expressions and tendency to walk into doors, and Yixing is his partner in crime. They look a bit like gossiping middle school girls, when they talk, but when they perform- going through every motion carefully and perfectly, Jongdae is mesmerized by how intense it is.

“I’ve been doing competitions my whole life,” Yixing tells him, as Jongdae types an email to his mother begging her not to let his plants die.

“Like a child star?” Jongdae replies, and Yixing just looks at him blankly, which Jongdae has come to learn means he either doesn’t understand or he’s not paying attention. Xiumin rolls his eyes, though, and sighs.

“That’s only for, like, television,” Xiumin says. “Yixing was more like a prodigy.”

Xiumin just seems to watch the chaos around him with a detached amusement. “It’s kind of like babysitting, sometimes,” Xiumin tells him, and Jongdae can totally see where he’s coming from.

Tao, though, remains a bit of a mystery. It drives Jongdae crazy, because he feels like Tao is the one he wants to get to know the most. Maybe it’s because Tao and Jongdae have a language overlap of twenty words, and it feels like a wall between them that Jongdae wants to climb over more than anything.

Tao’s anything but distant, though, once he’s done training for the day. He disappears every day in the early morning, only to return sweaty and exhausted by mid-afternoon, but after that, he sticks close by Jongdae, grabbing his arm or wrist and dragging him around, pointing at objects, naming them and making Jongdae repeat after him until he gets it right.

At first, it confuses Jongdae, that Tao is so… clingy, but then he notices Tao is just clingy, in general, and Jongdae is just included in Tao’s general affectionate nature. He’s not sure how that makes him feel, but he settles for just accepting it and moving on. It’s not Jongdae’s biggest problem.

Jongdae’s biggest problem, right now, is that he’s got an essay to turn in, and he’s not sure what to write about.

But Jongdae gets an idea for his first article on the fifth day, when he sees Xiumin practicing as the rain falls, torrential, from the sky. His clothes stick to his skin, but his face is determined.

Jongdae lugs his laptop outside, careful to stay under the wooden roof, well back from the edge of it so he and his computer stay dry, and writes as Xiumin runs through forms, until his laptop runs out of batteries. Then he gets his camera out and takes photos, of Xiumin, of the temple, and of the countryside that unfolds around them.

That night, when he plugs his laptop in to charge and rereads what he’s written, he’s pleased, actually pleased, at how the words reflect the things Jongdae’s learned here, so far, about the daily life of people preparing for the massive international competition.

“You’re supposed to write about the place,” Junmyeon had said. “The people.” Jongdae thinks he has a good start.

*

It takes about three hours to fly from Incheon to Changsha. In three hours, I went from everything I knew to what felt like a whole new world. The lush, almost tropical environment of Hunan province is quite different from the skyscrapers of Seoul. But it’s not just the scenery that’s different here, it’s the way of life. The people I’m staying with, here in the mountains, are all people pursuing the mastery of wushu, a broad name for the spectrum of Chinese martial arts…

*

The first chapter of Jongdae’s ‘Mandarin for Beginners’ textbook has exactly one hundred characters to memorize, with corresponding pinyin pronunciations and Korean equivalents next to them. For Jongdae, whose only dealings with foreign language include a brief and ill-fated fascination with the movie ’Azumi’, which lead to an even more tragic attempt to learn Japanese, it’s a lot.

Chanyeol, Junmyeon, Sehun and Jongin still tease him about it ruthlessly.

But this is a more ‘do-or-die’ situation, and every stunted conversation between himself and Tao strengthens Jongdae’s resolve.

He finds a cleared area, where there’s more dirt than grass, and settles himself down with his book. The mud gets on his pants, but it’s not raining, at least. His finger and a little bit of pressure are enough to turn the moist ground into a dry erase board, which is perfect for practice. As he writes, he says the characters aloud, repeating the sound and memorizing the meaning of each one.

It’s not that he doesn’t know any of the characters. He does. A lot of them, like water, and fire, and sun, and all the ones that are as much a part of Korean culture as Chinese, he’d studied in mandatory character classes in elementary and middle school. But now they have new sounds, and some of them, he’s noticed, are written slightly different, with lines where Jongdae expects dashes, and simpler radicals than Jongdae’s ever seen; just enough to trip him up.

The first day he does it, he’s squatting out in the sun, book clutched to his chest with one arm as he drags his finger across the earth with the other. He can feel the sun’s rays, hot on his arms and the back of his neck. ’I’m going to be as tanned as Jongin by the end of the summer’ he thinks, and then there’s a shadow above him. He squints upward, and Xiumin is looking down on him.

“Good luck,” Xiumin says, and Jongdae pulls a face.

“There is no way I’ll ever be competent in this,” he says, laughingly. “I’m destined to have ‘question mark eyes’ forever.”

“Don’t give up on things before you’ve even started,” Xiumin says, round cheeks looking even rounder as he grins. “Everyone’s going to stop talking to you in Korean, soon, so keep up the good work.”

“What?” Jongdae says, and Xiumin winks.

“Lu Han’s idea,” Xiumin says, and Jongdae can believe that. He thinks he might be more surprised that Yixing didn’t have a hand in it. “He says you’ll learn faster without crutches.”

“If you take crutches away from someone with a broken leg, they’ll fall,” Jongdae says. “I’m pretty sure that most people would call that bullying.”

“We’re not bullying you,” Xiumin says. “We’re… making you train as hard as we do. In your own way.”

“I’m trying,” Jongdae says. “I really am.”

“You’ll get somewhere,” Xiumin says. “You’re understanding more already.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Jongdae says, but later that night, when Tao talks animatedly to Kris, about something Jongdae can’t figure out at all, Jongdae thinks it’s not enough, yet, to understand the things he most wants to know.

*

Jongdae wakes up earlier than usual; before the first ring of the temple bell that signifies Kris is awake and getting ready to head out to do… whatever it is he does in the morning, after he rings the bell.

Tao is still asleep, one arm curled around one of his round pillows, and the other clutching at his bedding. He looks young, like that, Jongdae thinks. Innocent.

Jongdae makes himself look away, ignoring the butterflies in his stomach, and tries to go back to sleep.

He rouses again as Tao is slipping silently out the door, just like an assassin in a Japanese historical film, pajamas traded for his usual black garb. Jongdae sits up and considers his options, for a few moments, before he gets dressed himself, tucking his laptop and his camera into his backpack.

It’s a surprisingly clear day and the sun is bright. Jongdae doesn’t know exactly where he’s going, but he’s seen Tao go in this general direction before. It’s Jongdae’s only clue, so far, about where Tao goes during the day, while the others practice forms in the empty hard floored temple rooms, or kicks and board breaking in the multiple courtyards despite the heavy summer rains.

Luckily, Jongdae finds a path, made of stones, that head up into the mountains. It’s actually a fairly winding trail, taking Jongdae partway up a mountain and then back down again, into a small stretch of a clearing. Jongdae’s backpack feels excruciatingly heavy by the time he gets to the end of the path, and his shoulders hurt from his laptop’s weight digging the straps into his shoulders.

The clearing is not entirely a work of nature- it’s marked, and edged, and at first, Jongdae assumes it’s empty. But then, he sees something flicker at the corner of his vision.

Tao moves, Jongdae thinks, like something from another world. It’s fluid and fast and he can see the sunlight on the sword but his eyes still can’t pinpoint where Tao is.

Tao is amazing. Jongdae can feel his lips parting in surprise and his heart racing as he watches.

Tao notices him and his movements change; easing into a slower and slower pace until his strange and beautiful dance comes to a stop.

“Chen came?” Tao says. His face is glistening with sweat, dark pieces of hair clinging to his cheeks and forehead. He holds the sword easily between them, and Jongdae means to look at it again, but he can’t look away from Tao’s heavy-lidded, excited eyes. “Why?”

“I want-“ Jongdae tries to remember the words. “I want to see.” He takes off his backpack.

“Me?” Tao asks, and he smiles, top lip almost disappearing with it, revealing those straight, white teeth. “Sword. Be careful.” He enunciates, and even though his accent is different from Yixing’s, Jongdae recalls the word sword.

“Careful,” Jongdae says with a nod, agreeing. “I understand. Here.” He points down at the ground beneath his feet, and sits there. “No moving.” The last bit is in Korean, but Tao seems to understand.

“Okay,” Tao says, and Jongdae breaks their shared gaze, pulling out his camera and his laptop. When he looks up again, Tao is still staring at him, and now his teeth are biting down on his lower lip. Their eyes meet again, and Tao glances away this time, down to Jongdae’s computer.

“Work.” Jongdae says, pointing at it.

“Me too,” Tao says, and then Tao moves away from him.

For awhile, Jongdae just watches him, laptop open and untouched on his lap, losing battery by the minute, and enjoys the fluidity of Tao’s body as he goes through motions Jongdae’s only seen in high budget films. He takes a few photos, but they come out too blurry. Then he tears himself away from the sight, and writes.

When his laptop dies, he closes it and packs it back into his bag. Tao is stretching, legs open in a wide ‘v’ on the ground as he tries to keep his muscles from tightening.

He notices Jongdae is watching again, and smiles, sweat shiny on his nose. He stands, and walks over to Jongdae, pulling him up. Then he leans over and picks up Jongdae’s backpack, both eyebrows rising at the weight.

“Heavy,” Jongdae says, and Tao’s eyes light up with Jongdae’s newly learned word.

“Yes,” he says. “Very heavy.” Jongdae takes it from him. Their fingers brush, just a little, and Jongdae wets his lips. He pulls on his backpack, and then wipes his hands on his jeans.

As they walk back down to the temple, arms sliding against each other whenever Jongdae steps wrongly and stumbles, Tao looks over at him worriedly. “Chen needs less.” He pokes at the backpack.

Jongdae frowns. “Work,” he replies. His laptop is heavy, but he needs it to get things done.

Jongdae sighs with relief when they get back, and Yixing waves at them as they appear. Jongdae trips one last time, for good measure, he guesses, but Tao catches him at the elbow, silently pulling him back up. Jongdae’s back bumps against the side of Tao’s chest, and he steps forward to put space between them as he blushes.

“We were wondering where you’d gone,” Xiumin says in rapid Korean. “Lu Han said that Tao had you, but Yixing was worried you’d maybe gotten into the car with duizhang to get groceries.”

Jongdae snorts. “No way,” he says. “No death wish here.”

Tao quietly pats him on the shoulder, getting Jongdae’s attention, his fingers dragging along the skin of Jongdae’s arm as he pulls away, and then he walks away; Jongdae assumes to take a shower. “I-“ He’s forgotten what they were talking about.

“Did you have fun?” Xiumin asks.

“Yes,” Jongdae replies, in Mandarin, and Yixing offers him a nod of approval.

“It’s like time stopped,” Jongdae tells Lu Han excitedly, later, at dinner, “and then started again. That’s how fast he moved!”

Lu Han offers him a large, beaming grin. “You really like Tao, don’t you?” Lu Han says, and Jongdae swallows, and tries not to be embarrassed.

“I just thought it was super cool,” Jongdae mumbles, stuffing a dumpling into his mouth as an excuse to stop talking, and Lu Han’s grin gets even wider.

“You should tell him that,” Lu Han says. “In Mandarin.” Jongdae throws a second dumpling at his head.

*

There’s a notebook sitting on his bedding when he gets back from brushing his teeth the next morning. It’s simple and black, but there’s a tiny panda sticker in the corner.

Jongdae looks from the thin notebook to his laptop, and then back at the notebook again, before he puts it into his backpack in the computer’s stead.

He takes it out at breakfast to make a note. “Oh, it’s Zitao,” Yixing says, pointing at the sticker, and Jongdae’s mouth parts in surprise.

“What?”

“Panda,” Yixing says. “Panda is Zitao.” Yixing’s small, childlike hands come up and rub under his eyes. “Panda eyes.”

“Oh,” Jongdae says, and he thinks about the panda print on Tao’s sheets and the way he’s got that secret stuffed panda he doesn’t want Jongdae to know about buried behind his clothes. “Kung Fu Panda.”

Of course, Jongdae thinks later, Tao would give him a notebook. Tao, Jongdae has learned over the past couple of weeks, is so easily kind. Even when he’s teasing, boasting at Kris or making fun of Jongdae for his fumbling, stilted Mandarin, there’s still an inherent tenderness to his actions that leaves Jongdae feeling squishy inside in a way he’d never expected to feel in so short a time.

The notebook is something Jongdae can carry around instead of his laptop. Because Jongdae had said, in broken tones, that his laptop was heavy but he needed it to work.

Jongdae wonders if, in another way, it’s an invitation to follow Tao’s mountain path to its end again, with a lighter load on his back.

He hopes it is.

*

He nervously sends his very first essay for SM Geographic to his editors on a Tuesday, after he’s read through it a hundred times. He sends the photos in a separate email, and attaches receipts to both of them.

He closes his laptop and sighs.

*

“So what you’re telling me,” Chanyeol says, as Baekhyun calmly looks over his shoulder into the webcam, waving before retreating, “is that you live with a ninja.”

“It’s not-“ Jongdae looks up. Tao is currently on his bedding, dressed in all black as he wraps bindings around his wrists and ankles. Lu Han has informed Jongdae that you can hide weights between the wraps, which is used to build strength. Tao looks up, and meets Jongdae’s gaze, before reaching down and picking up his sword. “Ninja is not the right word,” Jongdae says finally. “That’s culturally insensitive. I’m going tell Kyungsoo.”

Chanyeol starts chortling. “Dude, you totally do. You live with a ninja.”

“Chanyeol-“

“Do you call him Miyagi? Oh man, Jongdae, make my life and tell me you call him Miyagi-san.”

“His name is Tao,” Jongdae says stiffly. Tao pauses at the door at the sound of his name, but then he’s gone, leaving Jongdae alone with his friends. “Mr. Miyagi wasn’t a ninja, anyway-“

“Only you would go to China and find your very own ninja,” Chanyeol says. “I didn’t know they existed outside of those small, secret societies in Japan-“

“How’s everything going?” Baekhyun asks, interrupting Chanyeol before he can really get on a roll. “Are you having fun?”

Jongdae considers his nearly blank word document that he has three weeks to make into a second full essay, the unceasing rain, and the ache in his back from not sleeping on a mattress. He looks down at his mosquito bitten ankles, and thinks about the fact that Skype doesn’t work unless he positions his laptop perfectly, even though he’s got a portable USB modem, right here on the edge of the table.

Then he thinks about getting tangled up in mosquito nets, and watching Tao practice sword-work on the grass, and laughing with Yixing in broken Korean about Kris’s inability to drive, and smiles.

“Yes,” Jongdae says. “It’s definitely been interesting.”

“How’s the Mandarin coming along?” Baekhyun has stolen the laptop from Chanyeol, who looks a bit bummed that Baekhyun doesn’t want to make ninja jokes with him. Jongdae’s just sort of glad Jongin is working late tonight or he’d have been treated to all sorts of choice quotes from ‘The Karate Kid’. Jongdae’s tried to explain that that movie isn’t about ninjas at all, but Chanyeol and Jongin don’t seem to care.

“Um,” Jongdae says, and looks down at his textbook. He’s gotten through the first chapter. “One chapter down, nineteen to go?”

“Well, it’s only been a little over three weeks,” Baekhyun says. “That’s pretty good.”

“It’s the chapter I’d already started before I left, though,” Jongdae says. “I’m actually pretty incompetent.”

Tao seems to think he’s incompetent, anyway, even though Tao has infinite patience, taking his time to repeat the names of things slowly and carefully, until Jongdae either gets them right or they’ve both started laughing at his complete failure.

“You have a creepy smile on your face, all of a sudden,” Chanyeol says, suspicious, and Jongdae looks away from the screen.

“Pot calling the kettle black, don’t you think?” Jongdae says, and then he hears the bell for lunch. “I have to go.”

“It was good to hear your voice,” Baekhyun says. “Good luck making it through chapter two of your book!”

“Thanks,” Jongdae says. “I’ll do my best.”

“Oh, by the way, I hope you don’t mind, but Jongin and I are going to throw a party in your apartment. I’m going to give him a terrible surprise and invite Taemin.”

“No,” Jongdae says.

“Wait, you don’t think I should? I’m really rooting for Taemin, you know? It’s kind of cute the way he sits outside the apartment and just waits-“

“You’re not throwing a party in my apartment.”

“You’re in China,” Chanyeol says. “But best of luck stopping the fun train.”

“You’re the worst friend ever,” Jongdae says, and Chanyeol starts making static noises with his mouth, like he’s imitating a television with no reception.

“I’m losing you, man. Jongdae? Jongdae?” Baekhyun’s giggles come through loud and clear as the call disconnects.

*

Dear Sehunnie,

I swear I haven’t forgotten you! Getting internet is really hard, here. We should set up skype time. Jongin isn’t invited. I talked with Chanyeol and Baekhyun the other day—I’m sad you weren’t home! Hear from you soon, I hope!

Happy in Hunan,
Jongdae

P.S. Can you steal the spare keys to my apartment from under the mat? I have a feeling Chanyeol and Jongin are up to no good.



PART THREE

Comments

[aosoira.livejournal.com]

Tao is truly a caring person.
^o^ /squaling over the net and trippin over grass/root incident.
He is doing a good job taking care clumsy Jongdae.
l was thought that the notebook he gave to Jongdae have something to do with wushu or learning Mandarin, turn out to be it was his attempt to lighten Jongdae's back pack.
.
kkk
poor!Jongdae and his lack of athletic ability. /i do as well, i hurt my side when tried to do a little stretching this morning.
Luhan should've told him to do some stretching like what Kris said.
.
Hope that their metode to stop talk in korean to Jongdae would make him mastered Mandarin faster. ^^