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part two hundred and nine
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Re: wc!au: team kai
(Anonymous) 2014-07-03 04:17 am (UTC)(link)He's sitting on the grass that day, his long legs stretched out in front of him and his toes pointed skyward. Practice is over for the day, technically, but he's debating an extra fifteen minutes of footwork drills when his best friend, Lee Taemin, comes careening up to him, anxious face untidily haloed by his windswept hair.
“Hey. Kim Jongin. I called you a million times, why didn’t you answer?”
Jongin looks up at Taemin, silhouetted against the early April sun, and shades his eyes with his hand. "Phone's in my bag. Can't answer it during practice."
"I need a favor."
"Did I owe you one and forget about it?"
"Come on," Taemin says, flat-out wheedling. "I'll owe you one. A huge one. The biggest. Anything you ask for, no matter what."
"No matter what?" Jongin’s eyebrows draw together. "Sounds serious. You don't need a kidney, do you? Because you can't have one."
"This is way more serious than that," Taemin says solemnly, crossing his arms in front of his chest. "I need you to get my notebook back."
He snorts. "Is that all? What happened to it?"
"That Kim Jongdae bastard snuck off with it. I just saw him flipping through it, over by the bike rack."
"Who?"
"You know. One of Baekhyun’s lackeys."
“Baekhyun?”
“Byun Baekhyun. Come on, Jongin,” Taemin says, kicking at Jongin’s thigh with an annoying repetitiveness that forces him to his feet. "This school has more students than just the soccer team. You know who he is. We had middle school together. That kid. The one on the bike.” He flings a wide gesture at a small group of students clustered by the bike racks. Baekhyun’s leaning up against a bright red scooter—not allowed, and certainly not by the bike racks—engrossed in a comic book. His uniform is unbuttoned, the sleeves pushed up sloppily to reveal a pair of pale, ropy forearms. He's got a lollipop clenched in his left cheek and his eyes are riveted to the book in his hands, but every once in a while, they dart over the page and towards Jongin, who's still standing on the field next to Taemin.
Before, they had existed with a hazy awareness of each other as they orbited in their completely different social circles. They were separate, distant. The serious athlete, the mysterious troublemaker. If you thought to draw a line from Kim Jongin to Byun Baekhyun, you would need several sheets of paper and an intimate six-degrees knowledge of the student body.
Enigmatic would be the most appropriate word to describe Byun Baekhyun, given his propensity to keep people guessing. There were rumors abound on his temperament—that he was alternately funny and flighty, cheerful and volatile, a peacekeeper but unafraid of a fight, friends with everyone and disrespectful of sunbaes—but Byun Baekhyun had so many facets that it seemed impossible to pin him down, define him, slot him neatly into any designation; except one: absolutely avoidable, at all costs.
Jongin remembers him now. Baekhyun who had had his growth spurt long before the rest of them, who sat in the back of the classrooms and never, ever talked, until they ran out of rows and stuck him in the room next door, who always knew the content of the reading assignments in-depth but was never seen with anything on his desk other than his head, heavy with sleep, arms curled to dampen the flickering of the fluorescent classroom lights. And that scooter of his, always getting yelled at by the vice principal for it but he never seemed to take much notice, laughing back, It's for my job, I'm sorry, I won't bring it tomorrow—but he always does because it's hard to argue with those brilliant white teeth, that charming smile, the eyes that seem honest. But who really knew the truth with Byun Baekhyun?
Jongin’s taller now, by several inches. He's not sure how he knows this or why it really matters, but it's all he can think of as he scratches the back of his leg with the other foot.
"You really can't do this yourself?" he asks finally, not sure why he wants to avoid Baekhyun—all he knows is that he does, because knowing Baekhyun seems like it would be complicated and Jongin finds complications tiring. Wake up, go for a run, eat breakfast, go to school, go to practice, do homework, sleep, repeat. He doesn't have space in his life for anything outside of these confines.
"They're not afraid of hitting anyone. My mom will kill me if I come home with a black eye. Your aunt will just think you took a header wrong."
"Nobody's going to hit anybody. It's just a notebook.” He heaves a sigh and kicks at his equipment bag on the ground. "Watch this for me."
Taemin claps his hands together. "Thank you!"
Jongin walks over to Baekhyun as slowly as he can.
—
"If I'd known what I was walking towards…" he'll say later.
"You'd have run away?" Baekhyun will ask.
"I'd have walked faster."
—
“Byun Baekhyun?”
—
”You said my name so confidently. I'd hoped you'd seen me watching you.”
“You'd been watching me?”
“For ages. Everybody had their eyes on you. It was like you were lit up from within. You were something special, and you had no fucking clue, which made it even more special.”
“That's funny.”
“What? It's true.”
“No. That's exactly how I felt about you.”
—
Baekhyun’s head jerks up from his manga, nose crinkled. “Kim Jongin?”
Jongin is taken aback. "You know who I am?"
"Of course. You're the best football player this school has ever seen. People who know this stuff better than I do say you're better than Park Jisung. I don't really know what that means, but it sounds pretty impressive. The real question is, how do you know who I am?"
Jongin shifts uncomfortably hearing himself described this way. Football had just been something he'd fallen into—everyone in the old neighborhood had played it when they were kids. It was only when the scouts had started showing up and offering his parents obscene amounts of money to train him and market him that he'd realized he was different—that he was actually good at something, not just "good" in the way that all kids are told they're good by their parents when they're young and trying their best. He was a quiet kid by nature off of the field and still had trouble adjusting to the notoriety that came with being good at something. People expected things from him. People wanted to be his friend. People wanted things from him, things he didn't feel comfortable giving.
“Lee Taemin—uh, his notebook—your friend has it. And he’d like it back,” Jongin says, ignoring Baekhyun’s question because he's not really sure what his answer would be and he's not all that confident speaking out loud unless he's already practiced it a thousand times in his head.
Baekhyun’s chin tips quizzically to the side as he studies Jongin, a strange intensity in his face. “And who’s Lee Taemin? Your boyfriend can’t ask for himself?”
“No—he’s—I’m not, no. We grew up together. He lives next door to—no. He’s not my boyfriend,” Jongin fumbles, instantly mortified at the incoherent procession of words that parade from his mouth.
Baekhyun seems satisfied with this answer, nonetheless, and laughs. "I get it. He’s not your boyfriend. Jongdae?” he turns.
Kim Jongdae turns out to be the boy directly behind Baekhyun. Jongin thinks he may have been on the soccer team in middle school but he can't really remember. There have been so many faces. Jongdae’s is handsome enough—or, it probably will be when puberty’s finished with him. Wide mouth, square jaw, a forehead obscured by shaggy bangs that clearly haven't met a pair of scissors in recent history. He looks tired.
He looks at Baekhyun, then Jongin, then back at Baekhyun. “He takes the best notes in class," he says in a muted voice. “I need this to pass the Lit test."
"You could have asked him to make a copy first.” Baekhyun shrugs and Jongin is taken aback at how reasonable this is, although he's not sure why, he doesn't know a thing about Baekhyun except he's shorter than him, that he likes manga, that he prefers cherry suckers. That he knows about Kim Jongin’s future football career. "Give it back."
"Man, really?" Jongdae protests.
"Really."
Jongin accepts the notebook gratefully, waving it in the air at Taemin to show him that he'd recovered it. He turns to leave, then thinks better of his manners and turns back to Baekhyun. "Thank you, I appreciate it."
"No problem," Baekhyun says, eyes already retrained on the page. "Great goal in practice, by the way. That last one."
"Oh. I—uh—thanks?" Jongin stammers, taken aback for the second time in this very short conversation. Baekhyun grins into his comic and does not return his gaze.
"See you around, Kim Jongin.”
Re: wc!au: team kai
(Anonymous) 2014-07-03 04:38 am (UTC)(link)Re: wc!au: team kai
(Anonymous) 2014-07-03 04:43 am (UTC)(link)Re: wc!au: team kai
(Anonymous) 2014-07-03 05:10 am (UTC)(link)yay anon!!
^
(Anonymous) 2014-07-03 05:19 am (UTC)(link)