dbsk_flashfic | forever, always (response to flashfic challenge 9: jamais su)

Title: forever, always
Author:

traumerei__x
Word count: 1050
Concrit?: please. D: this is awful, i want to know if there's any way to salvage it, or if it's a lost cause.
Pairing: past-jaejoong/changmin, and possibly pre-, if you're optimistic (i'm really not)
Rating: pg-13
Summary: i find it hard to tell you, i find it hard to take / when people run in circles, it's a very mad world: Changmin publishes an autobiography. Jaejoong learns he didn't know him as well as he thought.
AN: i think it's fairly straightforward— however, am terribly sorry if it only makes sense to me ._. hasn't been beta'd, has only been read through twice. if there are any spelling/grammar errors, please do not hesitate to point them out :) summary/cut text from Mad World by Tears for Fears. this is kind of angsty. mentions a somewhat ~~OOC~~ OCD Changmin. the end is kind of fluffy. bits near the end inspired by Evergreen.

When he phones you, it's been nearly eight years since you last saw him, nine years, eleven months, twenty-one days since you spoke to him. You miss the call, and the message he left is relayed back to you from a machine, nestled up in between a note from your sister telling you that you had better meet her for lunch tomorrow, or else and a reminder from your dentist about your cleaning next Thursday: Hey, he says. I figure you're the right Kim Jaejoong, but just in case. This is Shim Changmin calling. I know it's been a while, but I need to talk to you. I'm... I'm getting an autobiography published in a few months, and I wanted you to read it and let me know if there's anything you don't want in it before I send the final draft in to my editor. You can reach me at...

You rest your elbow on the counter and rest your chin in your hand and stare at the machine, blind and deaf as your dentist's receptionist whines. Changmin, you think. Wow. You repeat his message ten times, searching for hidden meanings in the pauses, in his inflections. You find none. You aren't surprised.

It takes you three days to work up the nerve to call him back.

You meet him at a cafe midtown the next day. It's trendy but not too trendy; off the beaten track, it caters to a different crowd than you're used to. You keep your sunglasses on, even as you walk through the front door (it's not often you're recognized these days, but you like being careful.) Changmin sits in a back booth, beanie tugged down over his ears, hood up, sleeves covering his wrists, held in place by his thumbs. Old habits die hard, you suppose. You make your way over.

"Hey," you say.

He blinks his eyes up at you, flashes a ghost of a smile. He nods in greeting, raises a hand from the table to gesture at the bench on the other side of the table. You take note of the subtle tremor of his hand, the limpness of his wrist. You sit.

After ordering a cup of tea, you remove your sunglasses and set them down carefully on the table next to your elbow. "How have you been?" you ask. Instead you want to say, Autobiography, huh? What did you say about me, I wonder. Was I the damsel in distress, the knight, or the dragon?

He shrugs, non-commital. He tugs on his sleeves and slumps his shoulders, looking every bit like a twenty year-old boy trying to hide from the world instead of a soon-to-be published author nearing his thirty-fourth birthday. "Not bad," he replies. His lips twitch, like he's sharing a secret joke with himself. You want to throw things and scream because that's so like him, still hiding things from you, even after all these years.

Instead, you hum an affirmative and say, "I've been okay, too."

Your tea arrives, and the mug burns your fingers, the liquid scalds your tongue, slides like liquid fire down your throat. You don't even taste it, but you drink for something to do, to distract from the overwhelming sense of awkward. You study his face for a moment. He still looks the same, maybe a little too thin and sickly. His eyes are bottomless, surrounded by dark, sleep-deprived bruises. Are you still alive in there, you want to say to this strange shell of a man. What happened to the Changmin I knew.

He ducks his head and pulls a stack of paper from the bag sandwiched between his side and the wall. He slides the manuscript towards you. He taps a beat on the title page with trembling fingers and says, "Here."

That's the title. Here (Waiting With A Rusted Heart).

You pick up the manuscript and you turn to the front page. You read. You remember. You learn.

He watches.

(he never put this in his book, but he should have: the feel of his body pressed against yours, sheets wrinkled and bunched under his thighs. the way his hands would flutter, flit about your body like a butterfly searching for the perfect perch. the soft keening sounds he would make, mewls and moans, and the way you caught them with your lips, gobbled them up until he was gasping and trembling and clinging to you like a newborn calf. the way he would whisper that he loved you, that he would forever, always.

forever, always had an expiry date.)

"I never knew that," you say, looking up from the manuscript. You're a third of the way through and you're stunned. Your tea has cooled to room temperature, mug half-empty. There's so much that you never knew; so much that was right in front of your eyes, but you couldn't see.

You scan that last paragraph again and try to swallow past the lump in your throat: When I was seventeen, I could not go to bed without washing my hands for exactly five minutes before and after brushing my teeth. I tried to break the compulsion, but my skin would tingle and itch and burn until it either drove me insane, or drove me from my sheets to scrub my hands until the skin was dry and cracked for days afterward.

His lips twitch into an almost-smile and he spreads his fingers on the table like a starfish. For a long pause, that is all he does. Just watches you with this sad look in eyes so impossibly deep you think they could be a well; if you get too close to the edge, you feel you could fall for an eternity. Then, he takes the manuscript from your limp, unresponsive hands, and in a soft voice, he says: "I think I'm going to go."

He sends you a copy of the book when it is published. Inside, under dedications, it reads: For Evergreen: there's a lot you never knew about me; I forgive you. Could you forgive me, too?

I don't think I've ever stopped loving you, he had written near the bottom, in his tidy, small script. I don't think I ever will. Forever. Always.