maayacolabackup (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
maayacolabackup) wrote2012-08-15 06:59 pm
maayacolabackup) wrote2012-08-15 06:59 pm
Entry tags:
Kpop: Underbelly (Sehun/Kai, NC-17) [2/2]
Sehun hasn’t really understood that he ‘s prone to obsession until now.
He traces the bow of Jongin’s upper lip and the slope of his nose and the curve of his neck, and he can think of no other word for the way he feels but obsessed.
It’s like how Sehun used to feel about the pebbles and shell shards and glass, but it is more.
It is more and Sehun can barely tear his eyes away from the crinkles at the corners of Jongin’s eyes when Sehun says something silly and makes him laugh. He can cannot look away because Jongin is the most wonderful thing that Sehun has ever collected; it’s a little like having Jongin means Sehun carries the sea around with him constantly, in a form Sehun can talk to and touch and taste, and Sehun has never wanted to keep something so much.
Now it is Sehun who sweeps away the dead birds in the morning, after he dims the beacon.
“But why are there so many?” Jongin asks, and Sehun swallows.
“They’re attracted to the light,” Sehun says. “They see it and they fly too close. They crash into it and they…”
He pauses, and Jongin licks his lips.
“Me too,” Jongin says, and Sehun looks up at him through his bangs, seeing peeks of Jongin’s face through the strands. “I came because I was attracted to the light. I swam too close and the sea spit me out.”
“But you weren’t near the tower, when I found you,” Sehun says, and he thinks about Jongin, curled up along the beach, long limbed and nude under the blue-sky. Jongin straightens, pushing off the wall and moving behind Sehun, wrapping his arms around Sehun’s waist. His arms are strong, and warm, and yet still, Jongin feels a little like the sea foam that licks at Sehun’s toes in the spring.
“That’s not exactly the light that lured me,” Jongin says, lips brushing the skin of Sehun’s ear, and Sehun shivers. His eyes focus outward, across the water, to where the rocks jut out from the waves, dangerous but beautiful.
He kisses just behind Sehun’s jaw, and then down Sehun’s neck, and Sehun’s heart rises and falls like the tide.
Sehun looks over the edge of the deck after he sweeps the birds, and sometimes, for a fraction of a second, he sees the body of a man instead, red water spreading across the rocks.
“I don’t-“ Jongin starts to say, but Sehun stills his protests with a kiss, licking into his mouth, salt-water taffy and endless spring, hands undoing the fastenings on Jongin’s trousers as Jongin shakes beneath him. “Sehun, I-“
“Me either,” Sehun says. “But I-“
“Okay,” Jongin says, and then he’s sliding his hands up Sehun’s shirt, fingers grazing pebbled nipples and sternum and skin that is hot, and Sehun kisses him deeper, memorizing the texture of teeth and cheeks and tongue.
Sehun finally gets a hand around Jongin, and Jongin hisses into his mouth, hips jerking up into Sehun’s grip like he’s never been touched. Maybe he hasn’t, and that makes Sehun even harder as he grinds against Jongin’s hip, gasping against Jongin’s lips.
Later, when he finally sinks down onto Jongin’s erection, Jongin looking up at him like Sehun is the gravity that moves the waters, maybe the moon, Sehun does not feel restless.
Sehun feels anchored by Jongin’s nails digging into the flesh of his thighs and Jongin’s half-open eyes and the feeling of Jongin inside of him and beneath him and all around him. He can feel the bruises on his neck and chest, made by Jongin’s lips, and the ones at his waist, made by overeager hands, and they only add to the feeling of being carried out to see, driftwood caught in the currents of Jongin.
Sehun has watched the ocean his whole life, but it is still unpredictable.
The first heavy snowfall begins in the middle of the night. Sehun can see the snowflakes as the fall in front of the beacon light, tiny white flecks against the dim-lit night sky, and he shivers.
“So this is snow,” Jongin says, and Sehun turns to look at him.
“You’ve never seen snow?” He pulls a face at Jongin, and Jongin sticks his tongue out at him. Jongin’s coat is open, but Jongin never seems to feel the cold.
“Not from above,” Jongin says, and as he looks at the accumulation on the beach, amazement sneaks into his eyes and the corners of his mouth. Sehun wonders if all these things are enough to keep Jongin with him, on the shore.
Sehun doesn’t know if he’s enough, alone. After all, he hadn’t kept his mother, and he’s been trying to fill the space she left behind with sea glass and shells ever since.
A part of Sehun has always belonged to the sea.
In weaker moments, he thinks that Jongin is the reason; that he was destined to finally find his peace in Jongin’s awkward flushes and parted lips. That the restlessness inside of him had called out to Jongin and Jongin had answered, appearing on the shore to take possession of Sehun’s heart.
That’s all right, because Sehun is pretty sure he has possession of Jongin’s heart, too, and Sehun’s always been a collector. Sehun’s always liked to keep things. He doesn’t mind being kept in exchange.
In the deepest of winter, the chill seeps in through the cracks in the old lighthouse walls, and the gaps between the concrete and the window glass. But Jongin’s tongue burns as it licks along Sehun’s collarbone, hot like sand in the summer, teeth scratching the skin just hard enough to sting, and Sehun doesn’t feel the cold. All he feels are the pads of Jongin’s fingertips dragging lines along his ribs, dipping into the grooves where Sehun’s skin is stretched tight, and Jongin’s lips are soft and hot and wet as he presses open-mouthed kisses to Sehun’s belly, before venturing lower. His tongue curls around Sehun, licking up the underside of him as Sehun burrows his hands into soft dark hair, and the light of the rising sun is shining off of the sea glass and Jongin’s eager eyes.
Jongin’s still sloppy; neither of them have it quite perfect yet, but they know each other’s bodies, and Jongin knows when to take Sehun deeper and when to pull back, too, Sehun pulled along in the current of arousal as Jongin teases him deeper into the waters.
Jongin’s slick fingers work inside of him, and it’s a triptych of sensation; the stretch of muscle, the heat of desire that laces down his legs from where it’s coiled in his belly, and the taste of sea-salt that lingers from when they’d kissed. Jongin watches Sehun carefully as he pushes into him, eyebrows drawn together as a bead of sweat traces it’s way down the column of his neck, and settles in the hollow of his clavicles. Sehun feels every centimeter, tongue peeking out to wet his lips as Jongin groans.
Like the calm before a storm, Jongin slowly pulls out, and Sehun gasps at the loss, and then Jongin is crashing back into him, taking him fast and hard, and Sehun just wraps fingers around Jongin’s forearms and tries to stay afloat.
Later, Jongin lies on his stomach, one arm thrown across Sehun’s hips to keep him close, and his breath whispers across Sehun’s cheek, the gentle caress of the midmorning flush of seawater leaving treasures for Sehun to find.
Day breaks across Jongin’s sweaty back, scattered sunlight making him sparkle like the early morning waves, and Sehun is shipwrecked by feelings that that threaten to drown him.
Part of Sehun has always belonged to the sea, and maybe drowning like this is as inevitable as the tide swelling and retreating against the sand.
“A part of me,” Jongin says, “has always belonged to the shore.” He brings his hand up and cups Sehun’s face, fingers curling behind his ear, thumb dragging along Sehun’s scar. “I wonder if this is why.”
Sehun lifts Jongin’s hand to his mouth, and leaves a kiss on his palm. “You belong to me,” Sehun says, and Jongin is one of his treasures, sparkling brighter than them all.
Sehun watched and waited for his mother to come back for a long time. Day after day, sitting on the beach and looking out at the ocean, he wondered if she would suddenly emerge, seaweed tangles in her hair and thin lips and suddenly, Sehun would remember her face and not just her laugh.
He’d waited and waited until one day, his father had wrapped grease slick fingers around his upper arm. “She won’t come back,” his father had said. “Sometimes the sea doesn’t wash things ashore for you to keep. Sometimes it’s just to taunt you before it’s swallowed up again in the waves.” He had sounded bitter, and Sehun had wanted to hug him but he didn’t. “Nothing good ever comes from the sea.”
”If she wasn’t good, why are you so sad you couldn’t keep her?” Sehun had wanted to ask, but he hadn’t.
But now, as he watches Jongin ascend the stairs, graceful as a ballet dancer with every extension of his arms or tilt of his neck, Sehun’s heart clenches, and he thinks he finally understands.
It’s not Jongin that is bad, though. What is bad is how much Sehun will ache if he slips back into the waves and disappears from Sehun’s life as easily as he had drifted in.
Sehun dreams of waking up in the lighthouse alone, and when he actually wakes, he can’t calm his fiercely beating heart until he feels Jongin’s breath against his cheek.
“Why aren’t you afraid?” Jongin asks, and Sehun curls his fingers around Jongin’s wrist and pulls him closer. Jongin falls into him a little too hard, shoulder digging into Sehun’s chest, and he is looking up at Sehun, eyes half-lidded and just the right amount of dangerous.
“I’ve never been afraid of the ocean,” Sehun says, and Jongin leans up and kisses him.
This is a lie.
When Sehun was six, his mother had picked him up in her arms and waded out into the water waist deep. Sehun remembers his arms had wrapped around her neck, fingers tangling in her squid-ink dark hair and face pressed to her jaw.
“Mama?”
She had shushed him, and then rubbed the back of his head, the way she always did when she thought Sehun might cry. “It’s just the sea, Sehun,” she’d said, and her voice had sounded like the waves crashing against the rocks on their way to shore. “There’s no reason to be afraid.”
She walked deeper, until the water was as high as Sehun’s hips, then his shoulders, and then he was breathing in ocean water, salt acrid as it went up his nose and down the back of his throat. His lungs screamed, and maybe they were screaming for a Sehun who could not scream, and then there was darkness.
When Sehun woke, he was alone on the shore. He could still taste seaweed and fish on his tongue, and his clothes were stiff with the slush of salt and sand, and his fingertips were pruned.
His mother was gone, perhaps lost among the waves, or perhaps found among them, instead. She never came back.
“In with the tide and out with the tide,” Sehun’s father had said over a hastily prepared breakfast of rice and fried eggs, three days later. “It was to be expected.” He poured the rest of his tepid coffee down the drain of their serviceable kitchen sink and wiped his hands on his trousers. “Nothing good ever comes from the sea.”
“I came from the sea,” Sehun says quietly. “Three days ago.” He traces the grain of the wood of the kitchen table with an unsteady finger. “Didn’t I?”
“No,” he father says sharply. “You were spared by the sea. It’s not the same. You’ll never belong to the sea, Oh Sehun. You belong to the shore, and to the lighthouse. Don’t forget that.”
Sehun doesn’t forget. He never ventures deeper than his knees into the water, feeling smoothed stones and rough glass beneath the soles of his feet and sticky seaweed clinging to his skin.
Sehun belongs to the shore.
Sometimes, when he’s sleeping, though, he feels the waves roll over him, gentle and calm, and the press of unknown lips to his forehead. He wakes up with the taste of salt at the back of his throat, and wonders if the sea has really spared him at all.
“Is it sad for you?” Jongin asks, sticking his lip out. “The birds, I mean.”
“Sometimes,” Sehun says, resting his chin on Jongin’s shoulder and linking their fingers together. “It’s so sad that they just… disappear. Almost like they never even lived.”
“Don’t think of it like that,” Jongin says, and Sehun pulls away from him, stepping closer to the edge of the deck. He sits down, letting his legs dangle through the metal railing. “Think of it like the Vikings did.”
‘The Vikings?” Sehun laughs, and turns to Jongin, who smoothly sits down next to him. “They sent their dead off into the ocean; to be swallowed and consumed by the waves after they’ve turned to ash.”
“No,” Jongin says, and he laces their fingers together, his thumb rubbing along the outside of Sehun’s in a way that still makes Sehun feel like he’s standing at the edge of a cliff and preparing to dive into the sea. “The Vikings believed in an afterlife that was even greater than this life.”
“So?”
“So they were sending their dead off into the sea to live,” Jongin says, and Sehun studies him with wide eyes. Jongin flushes under his gaze. “Don’t stare at me like that.”
“You’re beautiful,” Sehun says, and he’s not talking about Jongin’s face.
Sehun’s father has always said nothing good comes from the sea, but Jongin is Sehun’s pearl; living, breathing, laughing proof that maybe the best things come from the sea.
“No,” Jongin says, and then he flutters his eyelashes. “Well, maybe a little.”
“Stupid,” Sehun says, and he leans back, pulling Jongin with him, and weaves his hands into Jongin’s hair to bring their mouths together.
Funerals seem pointless when someone’s been dead inside far longer than they’ve been dead outside, but Sehun puts on a suit anyway and tries not to think about the blood on the rocks. The ocean had quickly washed it away, but the image is burned into his eyelids.
Sehun doesn’t cry. Zitao cries for him, face soft and wet as he holds Sehun’s hand. “You should come and stay with me,” Zitao says. “We could go to China.”
“Someone has to make sure the ships find their way home,” Sehun says, and Zitao blinks at him, his eyelashes thick with tears that shimmer in the afternoon sun.
“It doesn’t have to be you,” Zitao says. “Let’s go away. Me and you.”
“What about the others?” Sehun asks lightly, and already he is angling his body toward the crashing waves. It’s high tide. “We just leave them behind?”
“We can come back and visit,” Zitao says, and he blushes, and Sehun’s not sure if he’s thinking about Baekhyun or Wu Fan. Sehun squeezes Zitao’s hand, and drops it.
“It has to be me,” Sehun says, and he takes off his tie and starts the long walk back to the beach. “After all, I have to keep up with my collection, right? Still waiting for a message in a bottle.”
“Right,” Zitao says, and his voice is faint. Sehun’s already back on the sand in his head, sifting for shells and getting nipped by the tiny crabs that hide in the wet bits.
Sehun takes so many things from the sea, hoarding them in his room and falling asleep surrounded by them, but that’s only because the sea has taken so much from him already that it feels a little like getting even.
Sehun tries to ignore it, but he can see the anxiousness in Jongin’s every movement now. He recognizes it because he’s felt it; that restlessness that comes from knowing you’re in the wrong place but being unable to leave.
He sees it in Jongin’s eyes, too, when they’re quiet, gazing out at the ocean from Sehun’s window as Sehun rubs his thumb along the ridges in his sand dollar out of habit. Jongin’s longing, Sehun can see, for a home Sehun doesn’t know.
“Are you happy?” Sehun asks, and Jongin flinches, the way he always does at loud noises or surprises or unexpected lights, and then he flops over, facing away from the water, to stare only at Sehun. His hand rubs small circles along Sehun’s side, and he presses his lips together.
“I’m happy to be with you,” Jongin says. “It’s what I always wanted.”
“To be with me?” Sehun jokes. “Not much of a life goal.”
“Not like this,” Jongin says. “I mean… I always wanted to be close to you. Somehow.”
His eyes drop to the blanket between them, or maybe to Sehun’s hand, which still cradles the sand dollar that had seemed so large when Sehun was small.
“You didn’t even know me,” Sehun says, and Jongin’s hand stills on Sehun’s side. Sehun leans forward and kisses Jongin’s nose.
“Where did you get that sand dollar?” Jongin asks, and then he licks his lips. They shine and Sehun can’t look away.
Sehun had never realized how prone he is to obsession until Jongin.
“I can’t remember,” he says, before he kisses Jongin, softly, sucking his upper lip into his mouth and tasting the ocean.
“Stay safe,” says a small voice, and lips press to his forehead as his fingers are curled around something round and almost smooth. “I’ll be watching you.”
“He won’t stay,” Baekhyun says, as Kyungsoo teaches Jongin how to cut spring fruits.
Sehun had taught him, too, but Sehun does it all wrong, cutting the pieces into all different sizes so it looks more like a jigsaw than a snack. ”At least you’re pretty,” Zitao used to tease him, and Sehun had poked him in the stomach in revenge.
“Maybe he will,” Sehun says, and Zitao, who sits to Baekhyun’s left, looks over at Jongin and Kyungsoo measuredly.
“Maybe,” Zitao says. “But what if he can’t?”
Baekhyun’s white dog is old now, too old to chase after driftwood and messages in green bottles. But he still comes up and sets his chin on Sehun’s knee, and Sehun pets him gently and remembers the treasures that had slipped away.
“Then I’ll wait for him to wash back ashore,” Sehun says, his throat dry and his chest feeling tight. “I’ll wait and wait and wait until there isn’t any waiting left to do.”
As they fall asleep, later, Jongin’s head on Sehun’s stomach and body curled up in the way Sehun had found him, almost nine months ago on that autumn afternoon, Sehun knows that if Jongin goes, he’ll take Sehun’s whole heart with him.
The waning moon feels like a countdown; one that Sehun knows will come to an end far too soon to bear.
Sometimes, Sehun wonders what it would be like to make love to Jongin underwater. But then he realizes it would feel just like this, because it’s nothing but Jongin sliding slow inside him and Sehun, either way, can never seem to breathe.
“When we met, you said your mother was from the sea,” Jongin says.
“The last time I saw her,” Sehun says, “we went into the sea together.” He clenches his fingers into the material of his trousers. “And I came out alone.”
“Alone?” Jongin asks, and he reaches over and pushes Sehun’s sand dollar into his palm, curling Sehun’s fingers around it, and Sehun remembers lips on his forehead and a voice that’s much deeper now that years have passed.
“Maybe not,” Sehun says, and Jongin’s smile is waves breaking loud and foamy at the foot of the lighthouse, dragging Sehun down underneath.
“I’ve always wanted to be close to you,” Jongin says. “But I’m from the sea, too.”
“Is being close to me not enough?” Sehun asks, and he’s embarrassed at the wobble in his voice, He’s always been the youngest of his friends, but he’s never been the first to cry. “To keep you?”
“Sometimes you don’t get to keep the things that wash up on the beach,” Jongin says, quavering tone stopping Sehun’s heart for what feels like an eternity before it starts again at double the speed.
“But I’m selfish,” Sehun says. “And I want to keep you.”
“A part of me has always belonged to the shore,” Jongin says. “A part of me always will. Is that enough?”
Sehun scratches his nails down Jongin’s chest, marveling at the red lines he leaves behind and wishing he could stain them dark with ink. “No,” Sehun says, “because I want all of you.”
“We can’t resist the sea,” Jongin says. “We can try and try, but in the end, she calls her people back.”
Sehun writes his name into Jongin’s skin with every kiss. He licks it along the inside of Jongin’s thighs as he spreads him wide, licking at the ring of muscle until it’s slick enough for fingers, slipping in one finger and then two until Jongin is a gasping, panting mess beneath him. He writes it with his tongue along the underside of Jongin’s shaft as he teases him, and he pushes it inside of Jongin with every crook of his fingers upward to drag another tiny scream from Jongin’s lovely full lips.
He writes his name on the skin of Jongin’s belly with his fingers, and digs it into the soft hollow between his neck and shoulders with his teeth as he fucks him, slow and steady. Jongin’s legs wrap around him, and Sehun doesn’t like the way Jongin’s gasps and grunts sound like goodbye.
They lie, entangled on the sheets, and Jongin carves his name into Sehun’s heart with every soft exhale, and Sehun thinks it isn’t fair.
On the first of July, Sehun wakes up and Jongin is gone.
He walks out to the beach, picking up trousers and shirts and socks and underwear that are almost like a trail to the waters edge, arms shaking as he holds them to his chest. They smell like Jongin.
Sehun looks out at the waves, and feels the water swirl around his ankles, and his heart breaks, because Jongin had maybe carved his name too deep and the pieces can’t hold themselves together.
“Are you okay?” Zitao asks, and Baekhyun looks up from his book, to watch them both with steady eyes.
“No,” Sehun says. “But have I ever been?”
“For a while there,” Baekhyun says, “yes.”
He sees the defeated line of his father’s shoulders, now, when he looks in the mirror, and wonders if he’s anywhere near as strong as he climbs the ladder to trim the wicks. There’s oil under his fingernails.
Lu Han puts his hand on Sehun’s shoulder. “Maybe you were destined to love someone from the sea,” Lu Han says.
“Why?” Sehun asks, and Lu Han smiles.
“Your mother was from the sea,” Lu Han says. “There’s always been that sea-folk blood in you.” He pushes light hair from his face and his lips stretch wider. “It calls to you.”
It does. Sehun can hear it in his ears, even now.
…and Sehun’s being dragged from the water, the fingers curled around his wrist no longer than his own, and he coughs as air floods his lungs. The sand is cool beneath him, the sun not high enough in the sky to warm it, and if he squints, through stinging eyes, he sees the shadow of a boy, with pretty white teeth and dark wet hair that hangs in his eyes. “Stay safe,” he says, and he kisses Sehun’s forehead. “I’ll be watching you.” And then, the sand dollar, heavy in his hand.
Winter is colder than Sehun can ever remember it having been before. On the first snowfall, he walks out onto the deck and remembers the way Jongin’s face had lit up. He remembers the warmth of Jongin’s hand on his arm and the way Jongin had watched him, kissed him, pulled him closer with just the right look in his eyes.
He leans forward on the railing, and looks down, and for a moment, he’s scared he’ll let himself fall. But then he sees the body of his father, elbows bent in the wrong directions, on a bed of red instead of grey and white, and he steps back until his back hits the freezing cold concrete.
He takes a deep breath, and goes inside.
He opens the door to the first bedroom, his father’s bedroom. Sehun had been right about the dust.
On the desk, though, there’s a photograph. It’s of Sehun’s mother; he knows that as soon as he sees it. She’s wearing that seersucker dress. She does look a bit like him, he thinks. Thin lips and narrow eyes and high cheekbones. Maybe he’d remembered her face after all. She looks familiar to him.
Even more familiar, he thinks, is the look in her eyes. It’s the same one he’d seen in Jongin’s eyes; that ever-present longing for the sea from whence they had came.
The strange thing is, Sehun is beginning to feel that look creeping into his own eyes, and he guesses it’s because his heart is out there, in the sea.
“Why are you giving me this?” Zitao asks, and Sehun smiles.
“Hold onto it for me,” Sehun says, and Zitao holds his hand, like he used to do when they were children. The sand dollar sits between their palms.
“Why?”
“I’m going to go find a message in a bottle,” Sehun says. “I’m going to go find it myself, instead of waiting for it to wash back to shore.”
“I-“ Zitao starts to say, and then he pulls away, looking down at the sand dollar. Sehun thinks he’s crying, but Sehun knows he’ll be okay. “I’ll take care of it,” Zitao says.
“I know,” Sehun says, and he looks out at the swelling sea. It’s spring again.
Sehun stands at the edge of the water. It’s high tide, and the waves are rollicking against the backdrop of a starlit night sky. The moon is high, and full, and the waves crash as violently as they do in his dreams, ringing in his ears as loud as Jongin’s moans when he buries himself in Sehun, fingers clutching too tightly to Sehun’s hipbones as he shakes.
The water tickles his toes at first, and then his knees. Sehun looks up at the moon again. It’s shining so brightly.
The water is freezing, because it always takes longer to warm with the season than the air, and Sehun’s calves go numb quickly. The wind smells of spring beach, and Sehun’s known this smell as long as he’s lived.
Then Sehun is taking a deep breath, and taking a step forward, and taking the most terrible chance.
Sehun closes his eyes, and lets the ocean take him down.
Jongin’s mouth is as warm as the sea is cold.
“You made it,” Jongin says, and his voice is like sea glass, smooth at some parts and jagged enough to cut at others. It’s always cut Sehun in all the right ways. It ripples through the water, and Sehun wonders if this is how Jongin’s voice has always supposed to sound.
Sehun’s lungs burn. Jongin kisses him, slow and steady and hot, and Sehun melts into him same as he always has, letting his lips part for Jongin’s tongue and his fingers wind their way into that shock of dark hair. Jongin groans softly, licking at him again, tasting Sehun the same way Sehun is tasting him.
Sehun’s eyes sting. “Breathe,” Jongin says. “Just breathe.” And Sehun does, and the ocean fills his lungs and everything inside of him, and Sehun knows this is what it feels like to come home.
“I came to you this time,” Sehun whispers, or maybe he doesn’t. Everything is strange, like Sehun is floating in between. Jongin’s fingers slips against his skin, hot, so hot, and Sehun is turning to ash.
“I knew you would,” Jongin says, lips brushing against Sehun’s as he speaks, and Sehun is swallowed, and consumed. “I waited for you.”
“I came to the sea to live,” Sehun says, and Jongin laughs. The sounds slinks slick down Sehun’s spine. “Like the Vikings.”
“Then let’s live,” Jongin says, and he locks their fingers together, and Sehun’s heartbeat is louder than the sound of the crashing waves above them.
And then it is quiet.
Sehun can see a faint reflection above him, of the beacon from the lighthouse, and Sehun knows, if he ever wants to go back, he can follow it home.
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