and now i'm going to bed

[meiface.livejournal.com]

Stressed about the bar exam. Clearly doomed to failure. Cannot learn all the law. Here is some stream-of-consciousness unedited verbal spewage.

After the Drought
Victoria & Zhou Mi catch up. Implied pairings. PG. 850 words.


They're essentially siblings, adopting each other as familiar faces in a foreign country. They chatter a mile a minute in Mandarin when they're together - at long last, so many months later - about every topic that surfaces, naturally, in the winding river of conversation that flows between them. He talks about Taiwan, she talks about Pinocchio, they catch up; she asks about the cute boys in Taiwan and he asks about Nichkhun. She laughs and peeks at him over the rim of her coffee mug, cheekily asks about Kyuhyun. He tells her about the cute boys in Taiwan, a deliberate sidestep, about the shopping and the food and all the things he got to see and do until she sighs with envy and not a little homesickness. She tells him about Paris and he makes wistful noises, eyes faraway and undoubtedly thinking of the designer swag that could have been at his fingertips. She can say I wish you'd been able to come lightly, but in her heart it weighs heavier. It wasn't that she was lonely without him - how could she be lonely with so many people around her? But she did miss him, more than those months in Taiwan, because for those few months they were both moving together, like not-quite parallel lines, askew, that would eventually meet again. For that one weekend, she was moving alone while he was standing still.

It really matters less what they say when they're together; it matters more that she can shoot down everything he says with a smirk and he'll do his level best to turn the tables because it's an expression of love, more so than fixing his hair or buying her a drink or the endless photographs he stops to take. "Be nicer to me," he finally grumbles, giving in as she mocks the fashion book he's going to write, asks if he'll dedicate it to her after all the time she's dedicated to shopping with him. "How can I?" he asks. "It's a book on fashion tips for men!"

"I have fashion tips for men," she argues back. "Just because I'm female doesn't mean I don't know what looks good on men."

"I can't write a book that just says 'everything Nichkhun wears'. It won't even fill up one page!"

She pauses in thought and then dissolves into laughter. "You could fill up the rest with pictures."

"I'm not making a Nichkhun photobook!" His affected look of outrage morphs into a particularly salacious look, which only sends her into further gales of laughter. "But maybe I should. Steal your husband away."

They joke, but he has morals, and all kinds of lines in the sand he's drawn around himself until he's trapped himself in a box. She wants to pull him over sometimes, just tug on his arm until he steps out, unfettered, but she knows just as well as he does of their restraints. Self-imposed and company-imposed, blurring together until she sometimes looks at Nichkhun and wants, before she remembers herself. Remembers it's not her right to take. How much harder, she wonders, is it for Zhou Mi, that he can't even be allowed to want, much less to have.

"He's a playboy anyway," she says, because it's easier to lie to herself about not wanting him if she does it to someone else first. Zhou Mi looks at her, knowingly, because he can read beneath her just as she can beneath him, and sometimes she forgets that. She forgets it after too much time apart. Family knows you, even when you don't want them to. It stings and she thinks it shows, because there's a look in his eyes, one that appears every so often when he hears Kyuhyun's name. Not all the time. Not even most of the time. Sometimes, though.

It's not that she wants him, she tells herself. Playboy or not. She just wants something like him, someone like him, the possibility of falling in love and everything that comes with it. Maybe it's like that for Zhou Mi, too. Not you, exactly, but everything about you.

They walk. They change the topic. The sky wavers between sunshine and clouds, warm and bright for ten minutes before turning cool and cloudy the next ten. They slip unnoticed through the crowds, through the back doors like criminals, and they talk and talk and talk, drinking each other in, to store for the next long haul. They have some time, though. Things are calmer, with him back in Korea. They have some time before the drought.

The sky darkenes again when they finally part ways and she tells him to say hi for her to Henry and he says say hi for him to her girls. They never really say goodbye, because family is always family, no matter where you are or where you go. It rains as Victoria dashes from the cab to her dorm door and she laughs, criminal, sated, drenched, happy.