this isn't even a drabble.
Apr. 4th, 2011 01:24 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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jewelledhoursIt's Hyuk's birthday and the most non-surprise surprise: I have nothing to post. Not even a PWP. But I have written a few paragraphs of a new EunHae fic that I intend to work on (intend being the key word here) alongside all the other fics that I should be working on (at least half a dozen, not that I really want to count) and so I'll just post it as a "Happy-Birthday-to-Hyukjae" sort of thing.
486 words, not cross-posting anywhere, a prologue to a fic that will hopefully be finished sometime in the near - or at least near enough - future.
On an unnaturally warm day in November, 1953, Donghae was suddenly and absolutely certain that Hyukjae was alive.
Later on, he could never be sure of the exact chronology of events. Had he rinsed the dishes, put the sponge away and then looked out of the window? Or had he put the sponge away, rinsed the dishes, and then looked out of the window? He would tell himself that it didn't matter which one he had done first. He had looked out of the window, and that was the important point. But it nagged at him, because he wanted to remember every inch of that moment. If he could remember every single breath and thought and feeling of that moment, he would be able to feel the same certainty as he did on that late evening of November 1953 when he'd looked out of the window and seen the sunset red on the trees and known that Hyukjae was alive.
Because the world had kept spinning after that grey day in the trenches when the mail had come. The sun had risen in the morning and set in the evening; the stars had come out at night, incongruous as they'd seemed. Out in the barley fields where Hyukjae had learned to say the words 'golden' and 'tea' and 'sun' – such mundane words, really, when he thought about it now – the breeze had still sent the barley heads fluttering against each other in the soft, ethereal way that Donghae had seen again and again in the trenches, only never in colour, never in golden or sun or tea, but in monotone grey. Not the brilliant blacks and whites that sometimes looked more splendid than vivid colours, but the colour that tasted dim and salty and bitter all at once on your tongue.
At night he sometimes awoke to memories that brought the taste of grey into his mouth. In the morning he milked the cows and fed the hens and tried to remember how he'd once leaned against his horse and drank in the green of the fields, the blue of the sky; the maddening colours steeping the world that you could drown in if you looked long enough. And Hyukjae, holding the bridle. Brown of eyes. Or had they, actually, been black? Brown? Or black circled with brown? His grandmother's eyes had been black circled with blue. Donghae remembered her well. He'd tried not to remember Hyukjae.
But he could remember now. Because he'd looked out of the window that day and seen the red of the sunset on the tree tops. He'd seen a world of placid, rosy red. Red was a colour that existed only in a world where Hyukjae was alive.
And so he started out with that simple, irrational belief. Perhaps a little too irrational. But too-irrational beliefs, really, were all one had to hold on to when rational hope was gone.
486 words, not cross-posting anywhere, a prologue to a fic that will hopefully be finished sometime in the near - or at least near enough - future.
On an unnaturally warm day in November, 1953, Donghae was suddenly and absolutely certain that Hyukjae was alive.
Later on, he could never be sure of the exact chronology of events. Had he rinsed the dishes, put the sponge away and then looked out of the window? Or had he put the sponge away, rinsed the dishes, and then looked out of the window? He would tell himself that it didn't matter which one he had done first. He had looked out of the window, and that was the important point. But it nagged at him, because he wanted to remember every inch of that moment. If he could remember every single breath and thought and feeling of that moment, he would be able to feel the same certainty as he did on that late evening of November 1953 when he'd looked out of the window and seen the sunset red on the trees and known that Hyukjae was alive.
Because the world had kept spinning after that grey day in the trenches when the mail had come. The sun had risen in the morning and set in the evening; the stars had come out at night, incongruous as they'd seemed. Out in the barley fields where Hyukjae had learned to say the words 'golden' and 'tea' and 'sun' – such mundane words, really, when he thought about it now – the breeze had still sent the barley heads fluttering against each other in the soft, ethereal way that Donghae had seen again and again in the trenches, only never in colour, never in golden or sun or tea, but in monotone grey. Not the brilliant blacks and whites that sometimes looked more splendid than vivid colours, but the colour that tasted dim and salty and bitter all at once on your tongue.
At night he sometimes awoke to memories that brought the taste of grey into his mouth. In the morning he milked the cows and fed the hens and tried to remember how he'd once leaned against his horse and drank in the green of the fields, the blue of the sky; the maddening colours steeping the world that you could drown in if you looked long enough. And Hyukjae, holding the bridle. Brown of eyes. Or had they, actually, been black? Brown? Or black circled with brown? His grandmother's eyes had been black circled with blue. Donghae remembered her well. He'd tried not to remember Hyukjae.
But he could remember now. Because he'd looked out of the window that day and seen the red of the sunset on the tree tops. He'd seen a world of placid, rosy red. Red was a colour that existed only in a world where Hyukjae was alive.
And so he started out with that simple, irrational belief. Perhaps a little too irrational. But too-irrational beliefs, really, were all one had to hold on to when rational hope was gone.
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