#I FORGOT TO RENDER THE FUCKASS HAIR
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Blake dreams of a carousel.
Animals dance around her with painted wings and fantastic golden saddles. She stands among them – watching them go by. Such an elegant contraption decorated with jewels and lights. A skin of paint meant to disguise a skeletal contraption of iron poles and chain-work shackles. It creaks and groans as the gears twist and turn, moving it round and round and round. It doesn't sleep. It never stops. It just keeps turning, and turning, and turning, playing the same lively tune as animals leap and pounce over and under, over and under, over and under.
From upcoming chapter 18 - Moment of Peace, dropping this week!
Read Midnight Menagerie on AO3!
#midnightbeesfic#rwby#bumbleby#blake belladonna#There are at least 11 details on this that are direct symbolism#see if you can spot them all :D#*slaps the top of the horse* this baby can hold so much symbolism in it#Everything down to the color of the horse#Sawrin come get your food pspspsps#God I've been wanting to draw a carousel horse with Blake for ages#I FORGOT TO RENDER THE FUCKASS HAIR
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@toauz
JIHOON
“Half steps.”
“No, no. Whole steps. They sound - well. Wholer.”
“How many times have we recorded this already?”
Jihoon hasn’t twitched in the slightest since they’ve started. “I haven’t hit the record button yet.”
Oh. Word? “Mother fuck -”
[ BEEP ]
“White boy filming, white boy filming, black boy rapping, black man -”
“Hey, shut the fuck up.” He swings the camera down, pairs of feet unknowingly on screen. Jihoon waves one hand, his head shaking along with it. “That’s not how we’re trying to be, dude.”
“You uh, want me to call you yellow or some shit?”
“Do I look white to you, genius?”
“Well I mean -”
“Tsk.” He lifts his camera up. “I’m just fucking with you.” They’re outside for the sun; half of them need it anyways.
Some more than others.
[ BEEP ]
50 KIBUMS WILL BE CHOSEN AT RANDOM
“Does this app look okay?”
“Put a FMK question. I wanna see if they know what they’re talking about.”
Click, click, click.
[ BEEP ]
——
“June.”
His legs are propped up on a beanbag, back on the floor, ankles crossed. Bedhead sells, coffee breath doesn’t. The mental list goes on and on, a routine thing he has to go through at 12 every afternoon on weekdays. Houses have a stench. Home has five kinds.
The camera is off.
He grabs the nearest bottle of water and pokes a hole into the cap with his pencil. Water streams when he squeezes the plastic, first into his mouth. Next at June’s arm, ankle, crotch. The flow remains at the last, constant for seconds on end until someone that’s not himself makes a peep.
Jihoon presses the red button on the DSLR then. Woozi opens his mouth. “Apply yourself, you fucking hot dog. Be what you eat. Live up to your name.” The water’s almost gone, wasted. Then again, this isn’t California. “Make Gordon Ramsay - well, something.”
JUNE
He reckons that whoever said sleep is only for the weak had no fucking clue how to multitask, because despite being deep into a power nap, the gears way deep inside his brain continue to spin themselves into a fury.
Quarter notes and halves, chords bouncing along the slip-slide of a working bridge. Words hanging on at the edge. Both being something to reach out forㅡeventually. He’s the last person on earth to have patience rivaling that of a saint, but there’s no way he’s pissing himself over this. Not this soon.
Is he?
It’s then that June opens his eyes to the sight of the bottle. Then to the denim of his jeans, damp to the touch.
“Dude.” He looks up, beyond incredulous. For fuck’s sake. “Hop off. I was finally getting somewhere.”
The peak of a Miami summer means humidity takes up more than half of what they’ve got left to breathe in, and the side effects are inescapable. Where even an A.C. on full blast holds little ground against the sheer force of nature that is adolescent lethargy.
He stretches out, arms then limbs, only careful to not knock the bass over. His sight wanders, first to the beady red dot pointed his way, and up to the photos clothespinned by the window, turned so only the back of each strip catches the glare from outside.
“Done already?” And because this is for an audience, he’s back to the camera, smug grin in tow: “Mr. Graphic Design Is My Passion must’ve learned his lesson from last time.”
JIHOON
What the fuck is that supposed to mean?
Jihoon crushes the bottle with one hand when it’s all empty, tossing it to the nearest trash can. Tossing it to June (play catch with me, asshole) before he gets up completely and zooms in on said guy’s face. “It’s four in the afternoon already.” The specks on aforementioned face do not exist in a way that terrifies, prompting him to want to turn off the camera out of ridiculously necessary admiration. What’s your skincare routine, bitch?
And then this bitch’s smile comes into focus, and so. Well. Fuck.
He closes the monitor and caps the lens with its lid, setting it on the worktable to pick up any following noise the device can but won’t catch. Documenting for commercial purposes ceases here.
Like a child, maybe, Jihoon scoffs in amusement at the sight of the dampened fabric on June’s person. Wonders if sitting down on an actual chair will distract from the fact that he may as well be considered one. Reality chooses to let the idea starve, the heels and balls of his feet alternating on stained carpet every now and then as he stands and rocks in place. In a peaceable silence, hands in his sweatshirt pocket, eyes nowhere. Mind on what happens during four in the afternoon, and after, and the next instance two weeks from this one.
It’s a good hour, this one. The sun’s perfect every time, whether daylight savings is in tow or not.
He finds his lips are pursed together when he stops thinking, unsure for almost a second that that’s what he was doing at all. Finds that they’re almost curved upwards. Hates it. And so he looks up. They’re at eye level this way, strife a stranger unwelcome in such a proximity.
But he’s not looking at him. Because this isn’t for an audience, and smug grins aren’t actually supposed to do more damage than good. They shouldn’t. Some bullshit like that. This is why you make the beats and not the lyrics, you fuckass.
(But yeah, you are.)
“Let’s… go eat,” Jihoon musters. Snaps out of it, finally. Call it an L, but it’s a lot better than dreaming to the point of being rendered speechless after you’ve seen what you’ve seen. To be fair he hadn’t been looking for too long anyways.
But he looked. And the camera doesn’t always catch everything, sure, but that’s the point sometimes. He’ll sit on this until he dies. Longsuffering doesn’t seem so bad in theory if there’s a reason or two for it all. This cursed joke of a manly vessel will know by the time he takes his last breath.
(Get a move on, genius.)
“Breakfast,” he clarifies at the door before heading out.
It’s left open.
JUNE
“Wait. Really?” Smug to stunned, by the flip of a card. Even his moods arrive dichotomouslyㅡsome two-for-one special that no one had asked for. But Jihoon’s single-handed exasperation? Worth every penny. It’s what’s held the group together for this long: collaboration, companionship, and the constant need to impress.
However that last one gets done.
June stays put, as if the weight of all that time continues to hold him down. The ghost of it. The landlord had mentioned this place hosting a couple of those. In the attic, guest bedroom closet. (Insert joke here. You know the one.) If that’s something to believe in, then by now he’s positive they’ve been long driven out. Bells and whistles at full volume is the first trick. An obnoxious gathering of creatives the second.
But that’s only by night. Still-dissolving heat is hard to work with, so they’ve slowed their pace. Tuned to a lower frequency. Down the hall there’s the sound of a cough. Low murmuring. The muffled hum of a synth. Silence hasn’t been heard of in months. Or they’ve just learned to live without it. Perspective can be tricky that way. Inconclusive. Fuzzy.
Motion, for what it’s worth, isn’t any of these things.
With every shift, it’s marked all too vividly. Heel, toe. Press of the carpet. Crescent of a smile. Faltering, flattened, by the sweep of a hand. Reasons not to turn away, maybe. Not ever? Not yet.
Slowly, June follows suit, stepping over the bottle as he trails after him.
The nook is starting to resemble a garbage dump by the day, but the greasy McDonald’s bag is spotted in an instant. Nice. In the wake of a looming deadline, you can’t be too picky.
“The lyrics should be done by tonight. Recording by tomorrow.” He flops down on the couch, burger in one hand, passing the bag over with the other. To think they’ve been in a position similar this one so many times. To think it used to be familiar.
But that’s not his thing, is it? Thinking, that is. Thinking like that.
“After that we’ll have…what.” A pause to take count.
“Two more songs?”
The light at the end of the tunnel just got brighter.
“Crazy.”
JIHOON
Yeah? (Re: an eyebrow raise. Unaffected, and not just seemingly so.)
Okay. (His hand knowingly shuffling into the greasy McDonald’s bag, him wishing napkins and oil weren’t the only thing left in there for real. Less for him either way, huh. Who the hell took the…)
OK, O.K., okay. (Sinking into the back of the couch with you.) Alright. (Coming back up, resting his elbows on his knees.) A good kind of crazy, yeah?
(A pause that punctuates the one he’d just had.) Really…
Jihoon runs his hand through his hair, tongue prodding the inside of his cheek. Clasps his hands together in the space between his thighs, toes digging into the carpet, heels lifted up and away. Bottom teeth tucking his upper lip, that smack of saliva and gut that sounds different to yourself than it does to anyone else who is not you. Focusing on these moments a breath and a blink too long, the balls of his feet debating between molding into the stained material just below his nerves or being forgotten completely when he mutters, “I want it to be.”
Phew. This sound except it’s more of a whistle, almost silent, prolonged. His tongue sticks out between his lips, licking a curved stripe from one corner to the other. Bitch idiot who made the run to Mickey D’s forgot the damn iced tea, coffee, milk, anything. Bitch idiot is sitting right next to you, miserable. Sandwich-free, with a guy eating his free sandwich. A friend. His biggest who, what, when, where, why, and how in the moment, having fewer words to say out loud at a time than this standalone sequence. The air feels pregnant, and giving how much his stomach’s been dropping with every passing second, God? He might as well be, too. But you already know that’s a funny way of thinking.
Whew.(!) Crazy.
And not the good kind.
“You don’t think that’s a bit much?” Can we be on the same page? Vague hand gestures. His l*ve language, for and at anyone worth flinching in place. “Producing fifteen tracks and passing it off as a mixtape…” is crazy, and so are you if I don’t get to make this point out loud. Are you with me? “Extended play, whatever.” Jihoon’s face is sandwiched by his hands, the tip of his tongue resting on his teeth, nothing more resting on the former.
You don’t have to be.
JUNE
Apparently he’s not the only transparent one in the room. (But no one ever is, don’t you know?) An expansive vocabulary would’ve lent him with the right word to pin it down: subdued. Dude’s real subtle, does it so well that it could work wonders as a party trick had they had a place to perform it. June, as clever as he thinks he is, knows too little and feels too much to not involve any of those three words, offering nothing more but a resounding “Huh” and the slump of his shoulders.
If anyone asks what he could be huffing and puffing at, it’s safe to say that even God himself hasn’t a damn clue. His lungs need air, so he takes it in. Breathes it out extra loud for the sake of performative exasperation. Being obviously aware of details that shouldn’t matter has never done anyone good in the long run. Not when they do nothing more but set your imagination forward that far.
“Wonder where the water could’ve come in handy, Hoon.” Complete with a knowing, tight-lipped smile for the full effect. Still, he reaches over the arm of the couch and rummaging around, finds an opened box of Capri-Suns. “Sugar’s just as good.” It’s a reversal of his ways that only lasts for the second it matters: knowing too much, feeling too little.
June doesn’t say anything else in the meantime. Jihoon’s question is the same one that’s made its way through all of their heads at one point, rhetorical or otherwise. His way of dealing with it has been to not to. At all.
"I don’t think that’s our call.” Twitter and Soundcloud people would take care of that for them, but it’s just as likely that he’s getting ahead of himself.
I’m with you, either way.
Backtracking: “We could’ve gone and made it twenty-five?” He furrows his brows, like he’s trying to find the point of what he’d just said too. So it’s one step backwards to his earlier sentiment, because it’s honest, but adds this time: “It’s your call though.”
I’m not going anywhere.
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