for now, and for ever.
Jul. 3rd, 2013 02:55 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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caressingflamesfor now, and for ever. [Kaisoo; pg; au]
~1700w.
There are questions everybody asks themselves now and again: but for Jongin, there are some questions he will ask himself for the rest of his life.
Jongin’s not sure when, exactly, he loses Kyungsoo, but he’s certain as anything that it isn’t the date that’s engraved above his name, numbers black as the darkest corners of his mind, as all-encompassing as the spaces between the past and the present he sometimes allows himself to slip into. He wonders when the petals of Kyungsoo’s gorgeous heart-shaped smile fell away, withering into not quite nothingness – but not quite in proper existence either. The lips Jongin was unable to restrain himself from kissing turned a sickening pale, discoloured shade of its previous splendour, revealing a thin stalk of the line of Kyungsoo’s mouth, too raw and too painful to be reminiscent of its original beauty, and still – still Jongin managed to find them beautiful, was in awe of them, simply because they were a part of Kyungsoo.
He’s not entirely sure when the supple curves of Kyungsoo’s cheeks undergo the metamorphosis through which they turn into hollow bags of skin, barely hanging off cheekbones that are nowhere near as glamorous as magazines make them out to be, only skin separating Jongin’s lips from bone when he pecks Kyungsoo’s cheeks.
But there are some things Jongin does remember, things he knows the when of for sure.
He remembers the discovery. He remembers wondering why Kyungsoo kept complaining about pain, he remembers worrying when Kyungsoo’s family takes him to the hospital and his boyfriend is told to stay the night. He remembers the rapid beating of his heart, beats so quick and uneven he felt as though he were running at top speed – but from what, he didn’t know. And he remembers – and still chokes on the memory – the day Kyungsoo plucked up the courage and told him, small warm hands interlacing their fingers with his, eyes glazed over with unshed tears, lips whispering three words Jongin didn’t even know he’d had such a severe fear for in the first place – ‘I have cancer.’ He remembers feeling himself slip ever closer to the precipice of a pitch-black abyss in his mind he’d never noticed before, the end of which he knew, no matter how hard he tried, he would never be able to see through the darkness, or reach through this one.
‘I have cancer.’ The words were simple enough, Jongin had thought, after hours of holding Kyungsoo in his fear, after hours of soaking his clothes with Kyungsoo’s tears, all the while struggling to keep his own unshed. He had repeated those words to himself, muttering them under his breath, keeping them running through his mind through minutes and hours and days and nights, and still nothing seemed real. Kyungsoo was a little weaker than he used to be, and he stopped doing a lot of things – but his smile was still intact, his warmth was still the same, his heart still beat in time to Jongin’s. And for a brief window of a few months – for a brief period of time, so small and insignificant in the grand design of things – Jongin let himself believe that Kyungsoo could beat this.
There were a lot of things Kyungsoo was, Jongin had thought to himself, but weak was not one of them.
Fighter was.
Jongin didn’t let Kyungsoo in on this delusion of his – kept it from the older as he held his hand in the waiting room at the hospital Kyungsoo was getting treatment in, as he watched Kyungsoo disappear through a door and emerge a little while later, eye bags somehow a little more pronounced, smile a little less sunny. He didn’t want to let himself believe it, until soon, all too soon and all too sudden it felt like a ten wheeler had emerged out of nowhere and smashed itself into the walls of Jongin’s heart – Kyungsoo was told not to leave the house, the weighing scales telling of alarming losses of weight, the temperature in a 30 degree celcius room still too cold on Kyungsoo’s skin. It’s in the final few weeks of Kyungsoo’s time at home that Jongin finally realises he’s faced with a balding boyfriend, with unmistakable proof of how the love of his life was fading away before his very eyes, only a diseased shell with the remnants of the man he fell in love with still before him.
Jongin holds back his tears.
He holds back his tears on weekday evenings, rushing to Kyungsoo’s house after his last class to spend precious hours with the older as the cancer patient complains about his painful back, and Jongin bites back the remark that’s sitting on the tip of his tongue – because ‘you’ve already got your softest pillows under you.’ He holds back tears on Saturday afternoons as he reads to Kyungsoo, when he’s dressed in his thinnest clothes because the heat in Kyungsoo’s room is stifling, anything near normal room temperature much too cold for Kyungsoo’s fragile system. He holds back his tears when Kyungsoo’s mother wakes him one warm night and tells him that this is it – Kyungsoo’s to go to the hospital tomorrow morning, the doctor had just told her the preceding evening.
He holds back tears when he visits Kyungsoo the next day, tube upon tube disappearing under a flimsy hospital robe, a bag of liquid hanging at his side and beeps and machines humming quietly around him.
At this point, there exists a reservoir of tears and memories that composes Jongin’s very essence, tears so tangible yet unshed out of consideration for his boyfriend, memories so fluid and so malleable Jongin finds them a little difficult to believe, what with Kyungsoo lying there on a bed that’s not his own, eyelids shut and eyebrows unfurrowed in his sleep.
Days pass by quicker than Jongin likes, and he misses classes and last trains home and meals and sleep and anything that may separate him from Kyungsoo, who slowly diminishes in size and weight gradually before Jongin’s eyes, until he’s nothing but a skeleton with skin stretched over him. Jongin has to take care and precaution when he kisses Kyungsoo, and it says something about the amount of pure love he has for the latter that he doesn’t pull away, even as he can taste the irony aftermath of Kyungsoo vomiting blood on his tongue.
On good days, Jongin manages a few laughs out of Kyungsoo and Kyungsoo doesn’t cough up anything other than air, and they end up falling into each other’s eyes and laughter and things seem alright again. On bad days, Jongin holds Kyungsoo in his terror, tears streaming down his cheeks and painfully helpless wailing escaping his lips, mostly consisting of ‘I’m too afraid to die,’ and ‘I don’t want to lose you, Jongin,’ that beat him down where it hurts the most, but he never lets it show to Kyungsoo, never lets him know he shares the pain and the fear, instead showering him with love and words of reassurance, dragging the dagger of hurt out of Kyungsoo’s heart and driving it ever more into his own.
Sometimes, when Kyungsoo’s asleep and Jongin can’t quite manage to lull himself into unconsciousness, he thinks. He thinks about dying. He thinks about how dying is such a momentous event – a curse bestowed upon all those who manage to be born, and others still who die without ever having come into the twisted world he resides in. Essentially, Jongin thinks, all death is is just the halting of a heart. An organ residing in the middle of your chest that just decides it’s had enough and stops working altogether. Blood stops running through your veins, oxygen stops forcing itself into your lungs. But the implications of all these small, ceasing functions – the things that come after the official Time of Death assignment and the Cause of Death assessment – are much, much larger.
He wonders if people who are dying – like, and he hates to admit this as his gaze strays to Kyungsoo’s sleeping face, his own boyfriend – realise that they’re not just leaving this life, they’re also leaving lives behind. All the people Kyungsoo’s managed to touch – his family, his friends, his Jongin (for Jongin was so intrinsically his, after all) – throughout the short span of his life. How Kyungsoo might have given someone (like Jongin) their defining moment, how Kyungsoo always used to smile at strangers in passing because he knew that there were too many people in the world despairing of the world’s humanity (or lack of). All the big things and little things that are ultimately the results of having lived life, of having been properly alive – just as Kyungsoo still was, the heart monitor reminds Jongin – versus only just existing. There are hearts that Kyungsoo had touched before his own grows cold, and there are wounds that Kyungsoo patched up for others, wounds that will turn into the most beautiful of scars, fondly reminding their bearer about the kindness of his days.
Days that dwindled faster than Jongin could yell.
A few more months, at least, the doctor had said, he’ll make it to the New Year. But one day when Jongin decides he should at least show up for one class he’s in trouble of failing merely based on his attendance, that day – he gets a call. His blood runs cold when he sees his mother’s name flash up on his screen, because his mother never called him during classes. Ever. The class was small – not more than twenty people and Jongin was seated right in the middle – but he didn’t care, his heart was screaming that he needed to know. With trembling fingers he answers the call, and though his mother’s voice is soothing, though she tries to calm him down, well – Jongin breaks.
Because Kyungsoo is gone.
The hours and days following Kyungsoo’s departure are a blur of comforting pats on his back, one acquaintance’s face blurring into another’s and another’s, words of comfort that seem to reach his ears but never register in his brain and a numbness – a sickening numbness in the middle of his chest that gnaws at him and grows until he can’t feel anymore, either physically or emotionally, because the only thing worth feeling for – the only one worth feeling for, the love of his life – Kyungsoo, was gone.
Jongin’s not sure when, exactly, he loses Do Kyungsoo – but other times, when he’s left alone with his thoughts and his grief – he wonders why he had to.
A/N: Well. I really don’t know what you, as readers, would think about this piece – maybe it’s a bit rushed, maybe it’s not long enough, or things like that. I don’t know. To be quite honest I’m only writing this as a sort of way to get better. I don’t have any kind of disease or whatever, don’t get me wrong – but I did lose my aunt to cancer last July, just after having lost her sister a year and a half before. And cancer –
Cancer is terrifying. Losing someone you love to it is the absolute worst, and – and yeah. I’ve been numb, just like Jongin in this fic, for the past year and I
I think it’s about time I start to try to come to terms with my loss. I haven’t broken down over her in the past year, but I haven’t been to her house or her grave or. Or anything like that, really. And.
And I feel like I need to properly get closure for this. I do. Yeah.
I’m sorry if this fic isn’t up to your expectations? But really, it’s just me trying to. Um. Get better, in a sense.
If you’ve read this giant long A/N that I have never in my life written this length of before – thank you for reading. Everything. I hope you all have wonderful days and years with all the people you love.
:)
~1700w.
There are questions everybody asks themselves now and again: but for Jongin, there are some questions he will ask himself for the rest of his life.
Jongin’s not sure when, exactly, he loses Kyungsoo, but he’s certain as anything that it isn’t the date that’s engraved above his name, numbers black as the darkest corners of his mind, as all-encompassing as the spaces between the past and the present he sometimes allows himself to slip into. He wonders when the petals of Kyungsoo’s gorgeous heart-shaped smile fell away, withering into not quite nothingness – but not quite in proper existence either. The lips Jongin was unable to restrain himself from kissing turned a sickening pale, discoloured shade of its previous splendour, revealing a thin stalk of the line of Kyungsoo’s mouth, too raw and too painful to be reminiscent of its original beauty, and still – still Jongin managed to find them beautiful, was in awe of them, simply because they were a part of Kyungsoo.
He’s not entirely sure when the supple curves of Kyungsoo’s cheeks undergo the metamorphosis through which they turn into hollow bags of skin, barely hanging off cheekbones that are nowhere near as glamorous as magazines make them out to be, only skin separating Jongin’s lips from bone when he pecks Kyungsoo’s cheeks.
But there are some things Jongin does remember, things he knows the when of for sure.
He remembers the discovery. He remembers wondering why Kyungsoo kept complaining about pain, he remembers worrying when Kyungsoo’s family takes him to the hospital and his boyfriend is told to stay the night. He remembers the rapid beating of his heart, beats so quick and uneven he felt as though he were running at top speed – but from what, he didn’t know. And he remembers – and still chokes on the memory – the day Kyungsoo plucked up the courage and told him, small warm hands interlacing their fingers with his, eyes glazed over with unshed tears, lips whispering three words Jongin didn’t even know he’d had such a severe fear for in the first place – ‘I have cancer.’ He remembers feeling himself slip ever closer to the precipice of a pitch-black abyss in his mind he’d never noticed before, the end of which he knew, no matter how hard he tried, he would never be able to see through the darkness, or reach through this one.
‘I have cancer.’ The words were simple enough, Jongin had thought, after hours of holding Kyungsoo in his fear, after hours of soaking his clothes with Kyungsoo’s tears, all the while struggling to keep his own unshed. He had repeated those words to himself, muttering them under his breath, keeping them running through his mind through minutes and hours and days and nights, and still nothing seemed real. Kyungsoo was a little weaker than he used to be, and he stopped doing a lot of things – but his smile was still intact, his warmth was still the same, his heart still beat in time to Jongin’s. And for a brief window of a few months – for a brief period of time, so small and insignificant in the grand design of things – Jongin let himself believe that Kyungsoo could beat this.
There were a lot of things Kyungsoo was, Jongin had thought to himself, but weak was not one of them.
Fighter was.
Jongin didn’t let Kyungsoo in on this delusion of his – kept it from the older as he held his hand in the waiting room at the hospital Kyungsoo was getting treatment in, as he watched Kyungsoo disappear through a door and emerge a little while later, eye bags somehow a little more pronounced, smile a little less sunny. He didn’t want to let himself believe it, until soon, all too soon and all too sudden it felt like a ten wheeler had emerged out of nowhere and smashed itself into the walls of Jongin’s heart – Kyungsoo was told not to leave the house, the weighing scales telling of alarming losses of weight, the temperature in a 30 degree celcius room still too cold on Kyungsoo’s skin. It’s in the final few weeks of Kyungsoo’s time at home that Jongin finally realises he’s faced with a balding boyfriend, with unmistakable proof of how the love of his life was fading away before his very eyes, only a diseased shell with the remnants of the man he fell in love with still before him.
Jongin holds back his tears.
He holds back his tears on weekday evenings, rushing to Kyungsoo’s house after his last class to spend precious hours with the older as the cancer patient complains about his painful back, and Jongin bites back the remark that’s sitting on the tip of his tongue – because ‘you’ve already got your softest pillows under you.’ He holds back tears on Saturday afternoons as he reads to Kyungsoo, when he’s dressed in his thinnest clothes because the heat in Kyungsoo’s room is stifling, anything near normal room temperature much too cold for Kyungsoo’s fragile system. He holds back his tears when Kyungsoo’s mother wakes him one warm night and tells him that this is it – Kyungsoo’s to go to the hospital tomorrow morning, the doctor had just told her the preceding evening.
He holds back tears when he visits Kyungsoo the next day, tube upon tube disappearing under a flimsy hospital robe, a bag of liquid hanging at his side and beeps and machines humming quietly around him.
At this point, there exists a reservoir of tears and memories that composes Jongin’s very essence, tears so tangible yet unshed out of consideration for his boyfriend, memories so fluid and so malleable Jongin finds them a little difficult to believe, what with Kyungsoo lying there on a bed that’s not his own, eyelids shut and eyebrows unfurrowed in his sleep.
Days pass by quicker than Jongin likes, and he misses classes and last trains home and meals and sleep and anything that may separate him from Kyungsoo, who slowly diminishes in size and weight gradually before Jongin’s eyes, until he’s nothing but a skeleton with skin stretched over him. Jongin has to take care and precaution when he kisses Kyungsoo, and it says something about the amount of pure love he has for the latter that he doesn’t pull away, even as he can taste the irony aftermath of Kyungsoo vomiting blood on his tongue.
On good days, Jongin manages a few laughs out of Kyungsoo and Kyungsoo doesn’t cough up anything other than air, and they end up falling into each other’s eyes and laughter and things seem alright again. On bad days, Jongin holds Kyungsoo in his terror, tears streaming down his cheeks and painfully helpless wailing escaping his lips, mostly consisting of ‘I’m too afraid to die,’ and ‘I don’t want to lose you, Jongin,’ that beat him down where it hurts the most, but he never lets it show to Kyungsoo, never lets him know he shares the pain and the fear, instead showering him with love and words of reassurance, dragging the dagger of hurt out of Kyungsoo’s heart and driving it ever more into his own.
Sometimes, when Kyungsoo’s asleep and Jongin can’t quite manage to lull himself into unconsciousness, he thinks. He thinks about dying. He thinks about how dying is such a momentous event – a curse bestowed upon all those who manage to be born, and others still who die without ever having come into the twisted world he resides in. Essentially, Jongin thinks, all death is is just the halting of a heart. An organ residing in the middle of your chest that just decides it’s had enough and stops working altogether. Blood stops running through your veins, oxygen stops forcing itself into your lungs. But the implications of all these small, ceasing functions – the things that come after the official Time of Death assignment and the Cause of Death assessment – are much, much larger.
He wonders if people who are dying – like, and he hates to admit this as his gaze strays to Kyungsoo’s sleeping face, his own boyfriend – realise that they’re not just leaving this life, they’re also leaving lives behind. All the people Kyungsoo’s managed to touch – his family, his friends, his Jongin (for Jongin was so intrinsically his, after all) – throughout the short span of his life. How Kyungsoo might have given someone (like Jongin) their defining moment, how Kyungsoo always used to smile at strangers in passing because he knew that there were too many people in the world despairing of the world’s humanity (or lack of). All the big things and little things that are ultimately the results of having lived life, of having been properly alive – just as Kyungsoo still was, the heart monitor reminds Jongin – versus only just existing. There are hearts that Kyungsoo had touched before his own grows cold, and there are wounds that Kyungsoo patched up for others, wounds that will turn into the most beautiful of scars, fondly reminding their bearer about the kindness of his days.
Days that dwindled faster than Jongin could yell.
A few more months, at least, the doctor had said, he’ll make it to the New Year. But one day when Jongin decides he should at least show up for one class he’s in trouble of failing merely based on his attendance, that day – he gets a call. His blood runs cold when he sees his mother’s name flash up on his screen, because his mother never called him during classes. Ever. The class was small – not more than twenty people and Jongin was seated right in the middle – but he didn’t care, his heart was screaming that he needed to know. With trembling fingers he answers the call, and though his mother’s voice is soothing, though she tries to calm him down, well – Jongin breaks.
Because Kyungsoo is gone.
The hours and days following Kyungsoo’s departure are a blur of comforting pats on his back, one acquaintance’s face blurring into another’s and another’s, words of comfort that seem to reach his ears but never register in his brain and a numbness – a sickening numbness in the middle of his chest that gnaws at him and grows until he can’t feel anymore, either physically or emotionally, because the only thing worth feeling for – the only one worth feeling for, the love of his life – Kyungsoo, was gone.
Jongin’s not sure when, exactly, he loses Do Kyungsoo – but other times, when he’s left alone with his thoughts and his grief – he wonders why he had to.
A/N: Well. I really don’t know what you, as readers, would think about this piece – maybe it’s a bit rushed, maybe it’s not long enough, or things like that. I don’t know. To be quite honest I’m only writing this as a sort of way to get better. I don’t have any kind of disease or whatever, don’t get me wrong – but I did lose my aunt to cancer last July, just after having lost her sister a year and a half before. And cancer –
Cancer is terrifying. Losing someone you love to it is the absolute worst, and – and yeah. I’ve been numb, just like Jongin in this fic, for the past year and I
I think it’s about time I start to try to come to terms with my loss. I haven’t broken down over her in the past year, but I haven’t been to her house or her grave or. Or anything like that, really. And.
And I feel like I need to properly get closure for this. I do. Yeah.
I’m sorry if this fic isn’t up to your expectations? But really, it’s just me trying to. Um. Get better, in a sense.
If you’ve read this giant long A/N that I have never in my life written this length of before – thank you for reading. Everything. I hope you all have wonderful days and years with all the people you love.
:)
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no subject
Date: 2013-07-02 09:23 pm (UTC)I somehow knew while reading this that it was more personal than an actual fic. your description of kyungsoo faltering and fading away was just too real, why do I find it real? because I've been there and saw my aunt (too) wasting away day by day, life leaving her body with every breath she let out (which is morbidly ironic because breathing is supposed to keep you alive)...
there are probably more horrible deseases out there but I hate cancer the most because of that excrutiating process it makes everyone go through to finally, inevitably, meet the 'dead' end. I lost my 15-y.o cousin to some cardiac illness 10 years ago. we had never known about it until he got the heart attack, it was so sudden but whenever I think of him, I only have good & happy memories of him. I wish I could say the same about my aunt but the painful memories of her last days will always haunt me adding to the already hurtful feeling of loss...
I understand your words and your need for a closure because life goes on as they say. I would give you an encouraging hug if I could, it's not gonna be easy and tbh it never really does, not even time can take away the pain, it'll be there but we need to learn to live with it and move on...
sorry about this unnecessarily long comment but I'm sure you'd understand
no subject
Date: 2013-07-02 09:47 pm (UTC)beautiful kaisoo fic btw. hit close to home <33